Bill Moyers, after showing clips of old conversations with World War II veterans:
Every Memorial Day I think about what those men did and what we owe them.
They didn’t go through hell for a political system that functions on bribery, or for offshore tax havens that pass the cost of national defense from the conglomerates that profit from war to the ordinary people whose children fight it, or for an economic system that treats working men and women as disposable cogs to be tossed aside at a predator’s whim, or for an America where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
Yes, our soldiers did fight and sacrifice for freedom, but as wiser men than I have said through the ages, when liberty is separated from justice, neither liberty nor justice is safe, and those who sacrifice for both are mocked.
On April 30, 2004, the late-night ABC News show Nightline aired a tribute to the fallen, showing photos of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq while Ted Koppel read their names. (Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns the local ABC affiliate, banned the broadcast on stations they owned.) Nightline repeated the tribute, with more names, on Memorial Day 2005.
Nightline is a half-hour program. If they had repeated the tribute this year, with no interruptions, they would have had only about half a second for each fallen soldier. We are currently at 3,455 dead — and counting.
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