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A Veterans Memorial commemorating the men and women from northeast Iowa who served in America’s Armed Services now occupies a small park across from our home. It sits comfortably next to a playground and picnic shelter.
My partner Rebecca’s father served America during WWII as an electrician on a Navy ship in the South Pacific. My father, in the same area, was a Medic in the Coast Guard. Jason, one of Rebecca’s sons-in-law, is a Colonel in the Marines and has deployed in Afghanistan.
The obelisk in the photo presents the memorial’s main idea: how freedom sometimes requires force, including the instrument of war.
Armed forces were necessary to stop Hitler and to slow Putin.
But freedom’s enemies sometimes entrench inside a country.
So one citizen must fight another to expand freedom to a third.
Luman L. Caldwell was a Civil War veteran and Decorah’s only Medal of Honor recipient. Mr. Caldwell swam across an Alabama bayou to secure a small boat that was then used by his company to attack and capture a unit of soldiers.
In America, war was necessary to destroy slavery.
After slavery, the U.S. Army occupied the 11 Confederate States to protect the rights of former slaves, now American citizens.
When the army withdrew from those states in 1877, southern governors, legislators, and Ku Klux Klans created through law and terror an American Apartheid that would last for 80 years. As a consequence, six million Black American citizens migrated from their southern homes to places north and west.
More than 4000 were lynched.
The nonviolent Black Freedom Movement arose to redress these grievances. Resistance to the expansion of freedom to African Americans was violent.
In 1962, President Kennedy ordered the Army and National Guard units to protect James Meredith as he became the first Black citizen to enroll at the University of Mississippi.
Resistance led by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett required 31,000 troops to quell the riots surrounding this effort to enroll an American citizen in an American university.
This new neighborhood addition shines its lights at night.
Freedom’s enemies, wherever they reside, require eternal vigilance.
