Over the years, my father and I have diverged greatly on politics. From my perspective, he’s become a Conservative crank. From his, I’ve become a deluded Liberal. And of course we both furiously deny the charges, considering ourselves to be fiercely independent.
Real or illusory, I get that sense of being a political independent from him. There’s a lot I get from him in fact. And so in many ways, our very grave differences are just opposite sides of the same coin, alternate ways to express what are, at heart, shared values.
Those shared values have come about in part because he raised me. And in part they’ve come about because we, each in our own fiercely independent way, have simply reached similar conclusions about many of life’s big questions.
One of the values we share is a critical and complicated, yet very real sense of patriotism to the United States.
We both have an abiding faith in the American republic, though we will be quick to point out its many flaws. And we both believe that the American people are capable of, and should even be expected to do the right thing, even if they so often do not.
One of the ways I express a complicated and critical sense of patriotism is by remembering.
My father has never commanded, but always encouraged me to take a moment during the Memorial Day weekend to remember those who have given their lives in defense of America. It doesn’t have to be on Monday. It’s a long weekend. Just find a time that works for you, he has suggested, and remember.
I do.
And when I stop to reflect upon those who have died, I try to be as inclusive as possible and remember everyone who died 
in our wars. After all, it’s easy to get teary eyed when thinking about the soldiers who heroically gave all on D-Day, valiantly running into the storm of bullets so we could take down the fucking Nazis. But I am also grateful for the cowards, the boys who pissed their pants and cried, the ones who really, really didn’t want to die and probably would have runaway if they could.
I also remember those who dutifully went to wars that I disagreed with. And as a history professor, there are a whole bunch of them I disagree with. But that doesn’t stop me from honoring the kids who fought them anyway because they did what their draft cards told them to, or because they were poor and needed a steady paycheck, or because they were proud to answer when called upon by failed politicians who betrayed their sacred trust. I think about those among them who never came home either.
And I remember the civilians. The innocent victims of every war: women, children, elders, and even the men who weren’t fighting. The ones, who for no good reason, caught a bullet while out in the fields, who had a bomb fall on their home, or who more likely died in great agony from disease and starvation. They too are in my thoughts.
When mentioning Memorial Day, my father has often framed his request in relation to our family: Take a moment to remember your Uncle Oswald.
I never got to meet Oswald Lowrance, my father’s favorite uncle, his mother’s brother. When my dad was just a boy, Oswald was the uncle who helped him train his dog and taught him how to hunt with granddaddy’s shotgun. When WWII broke out, Oswald came home to North Carolina from Detroit, where he’d been working on an assembly line, and he joined the Marines. All the Reinhardt boys came home from the war, more or less in one piece. But Oswald died during the invasion of Iwo Jima.
My father never commanded me to celebrate Memorial Day, because he knows how thoroughly unpatriotic it is to demand patriotism of others. You’re free to expect it, but never demand it. And so he has only suggested it from time to time.
I’ll go him one better. I won’t even request that you to remember the dead this Memorial Day. It’s not for me to even ask you, much less tell you. Because it is for all Americans to express their patriotism each in their own way, or to decide if being patriotic even makes any sense to them at all. It may not, and that’s fine too.
But if you do pause to remember at some point this weekend, might I ask you to count among your thoughts my father’s favorite uncle, his mother’s only brother, and her parents’ only son? He never came home, but they still speak of him fondly.