Some Short Thoughts on the Longest Day

The farther out in space we go, I believe the more alike we look. It’s only when we re-enter our atmosphere that the effects of gravity and tribalism become more pronounced. Residing as I do in Global City Norwich, I smile as we punctuate our lives with a growing variety of celebrations of so many of the different stories we are as the people who all happen to call this place our home.

I wanted to emphasize the importance of stories because when we speak of History, which is really the story we tell ourselves of who we are and how we came to be, we usually think in terms of capital letters and monumental events, forgetting that all of us are the authors of our own tales of our time here on earth.

In last Sunday’s Bulletin was a wonderful supplement devoted to the 75^th anniversary of the allied invasion of Europe at Normandy, France, always called D-Day, which but for the weather forecast this week in 1944 we would commemorate today but that we’ll observe tomorrow, June 6.

In deference to, and respect for, Edward Shepherd Creasy, who authored “The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World,” almost a century before the beaches were stormed at Normandy, D-Day wasn’t just a battle historians have concluded ultimately won World War II and saved Western Europe, but may also have been the milestone in our country’s journey of political, social, military, and economic ascendance in a world landscape littered with sometimes petty parochial and ideological loyalties.

We think of larger than life men and monumental moments when we study D-Day and there are many to choose from but we risk losing sight of the human element of our own humanity in the details that the day involved, which is what we should remember.

The survivor stories, so many people in the same device, fighting not only for something grand and noble like a Free Europe and, by extension, the free world but also for one another. They sought out a protected position where the sea met the shore while being raked by weapons fire without rest or respite as waves of troops waded onto the beaches and wrote with their blood and sacrifice the first chapters of what was to become our modern, Post-War World where we hoped cooperation would replace confrontation.

Many years ago, I had the opportunity to walk the beaches of Normandy and struggled to imagine the carnage and brutality of the conditions on that day and the courage it would have taken to overcome them. It’s a way of learning history that books and classrooms, while important, can’t really touch, but for many of us the stories, more so than the lessons, are all we have.  

And many of those D-Day stories are deservedly well-known while others less so but I’m always struck in reading and remembering June 6, 1944, by what we, the inheritors of the world those who never saw the dawn on June 7, have done with it. And by how much harder we should still work.  

-bill kenny