Unless
Warnings from Omaha Beach
A 56-year-old brigadier general, the son of a president, insisted on landing with the first wave on D-Day. Upon realizing that they landed in the wrong place he said, “We’ll start the war from right here.”
Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr.’s war was real. Ours is metaphorical, but it is informed by the sacrifice of the men who rest in perpetuity at the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach. They lie in permanent repose, marked by gravestones planted in perfectly symmetrical lines, silent as Truffula trees.
The Lorax spoke for the trees for the trees had no tongues. Roosevelt and the men who rest at Normandy are our Once-ler, handing us a seed as a reminder of the price of freedom. They are speaking to us from the past with a single word of warning: unless.
Say Omaha today and thoughts pivot to college baseball, mail order ribeye steaks, or Peyton Manning rather than a shibboleth to sacrifice in the name of freedom. We have forgotten that the line of American freedom isn’t a straight path. It is a jagged path of bloodshed that starts at Lexington Green, runs through Antietam, and Normandy to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. The path is a reminder that America is an ideal captured in what Walter Isaacson calls the greatest sentence ever written, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
Today that democracy is under attack. It is under attack from within by the very institutions charged with maintaining the rule of law. George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis was a warning shot. The violence occurring on the streets of Minneapolis today is a potential kill shot that threatens competent self‑rule and the legitimacy of the government itself
Jefferson gave us the north star of freedom. Madison gave us the gears, the checks and balances. Lincoln challenged us to make our lives worthy of the sacrifice of the men who gave the last full measure of devotion. Dr. King spoke of the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice.
But the arc does not bend on its own. Our freedom, our form of government aren’t guaranteed. Roosevelt didn’t wait for perfect conditions on Utah Beach. He looked at chaos and said, ‘We’ll start the war from right here.’ The war for the soul of our democracy starts here. And it starts with us and people like us who care a whole awful lot.