Faded photos in albums bound in what was once black leather, but now has turned to gray, show my uncle in his Army uniform — show my mother and her sister at work in the war effort as telephone switchboard operators. This is the extent of my personal contact with World War II. Like most Americans, I remember nothing about that war’s sacrifices overseas in blood and flesh or the lesser sacrifices on the home front caused by the rationing of goods.
For his book, “The Good War,” historian Studs Terkel used a tape recorder to catch what memories remain of such sacrifices. He had a term for the diminishing pool of those who had lived through that era. He called them the “rememberers.” In just this newspaper in just this year, 55 obituaries of World War II vets have appeared, a hint at a national forgetting.
Now, our memory is about to be refreshed. America, which has been, for decades, largely secure, largely self-indulgent, a nation of vanity license plates, SUVs, couch potatoes and burgeoning 401k plans, enters another, different sort of war with who knows what demands for sacrifice.
Will civilians here again be the targets of terrorism; will U.S. troops lose their lives; will gasoline be rationed; will our taste for the latest electronic gizmo turn sour; will the economy stagger; will civil liberties be curtailed? Will what has been characterized as a nation gone soft be able to rise to the challenges? What is to become of us?
James M. Wall is a United Methodist clergyman and senior contributing editor for Christian Century magazine, published in Chicago. He noted that sacrifice is at the heart of one of the main belief systems of this country, Christianity.
“The sacrifice of Jesus who went to his death out of love for us makes sacrifice central to the faith,” Wall said. “I think of sacrifice as an adjective to `love,’ as in `sacrificial love.’
“To be an authentic sacrifice, though, the purpose has to be meaningful. If I’m a reservist — as I was during the Korean War — and I’m called up to guard the airport from terrorists, that’s a good purpose. If I’m taxed to support a military operation that has no clear merit, that’s a problem.
“Sacrificing for the sake of others benefits them, of course, but it benefits you so much more. Authentic sacrificial love brings things into focus. You don’t build up possessions but give them away and your life, too, if need be.” Getting rid of much of the materialism of modern living doesn’t need to be painful, said Scott Savage, a Quaker living in Barnesville, Ohio, who has published Plain, a magazine of simple living.
Savage turned in his driver’s license and now gets around by horse and buggy. There are no media in his house. He, his wife and five kids raise much of what they eat.
“The thing about sacrifice,” he said, “is that there’s always a gift underneath. You can radically curtail your consumer life without feeling like a caveman. In fact, doing without opens a whole world of more direct experience of life. It’s actually nice.”
Somewhat similarly, Terkel’s “rememberers” seem to recall being made better people in a nation made better because of its sacrifices. Though he doesn’t see the war in the first half of the 1940s and the now-emerging war against terrorism as directly analogous, he knows there are sacrifices to come. He said one already visited upon us is the loss of our nation’s cozy self-image.
“We can no longer pretend that we’re some kind of fortress,” he said.
Terkel noted a fundamental change in the way we’ll look at others. “When we see images of a Iraqi boy who has been wounded by American bombs, that’s our boy,” he said. “When we see that famous photo of the Vietnamese girl who was hit by our napalm, that’s our kid too.”
Wall agrees. In an upcoming column in Christian Century, he’ll argue that no one in this country can any longer ignore the fact that “the human family is global,” and that now is a time “for reordering how we view the world.”
Sacrifice certainly hurts. But it also may, in the long run, help. The challenges of the coming years could make us less self-centered, less materialistic, more focused on what’s truly important. The patriotism that is sweeping the country may trickle down to the local level reviving the civic organizations that lately have been languishing.
In her later years, my mother always made sure that the kitchen shelves were well stocked with canned goods. She avoided debt as though borrowed money had a curse on it.
Though she never made the connection aloud, these seemingly quaint habits no doubt came of her living through the uncertainties of an era of war, years that forever shaped her and her generation. Sometime in the future will a latter-day Terkel gather our memories of the anti-terrorism war years? Will we have been forever shaped by them?
