D-Day + 75

One of the most moving of all of FDR's wartime speeches was his address to the nation on D-Day, June 6, 1944, his famous D-Day Prayer. The first President Roosevelt had famously referred to the presidency as a "bully pulpit," and never was it more so than on D-Day, when on radio FDR led the entire nation in what was perhaps the best attended prayer service in our nation's history - worth revisiting on this 75th anniversary. 

In the entire nation's name, the President prayed: Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. FDR's prayer touched all the right bases - including the all-important home front: Give us Faith in Thee; Faith in our sons; Faith in each other; Faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

To hear the President's entire prayer as Americans first heard it 75 years ago, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2IRcc-5RgA.

Today, 75 years later, a very different U.S. President governs a very different United States, a nation in which such a prayer and the values it expressed are increasingly almost inconceivable. The whole D-Day enterprise, which created the conditions that have made our contemporary world possible and which is being commemorated by its beneficiaries this week with such solemnity and pomp in Britain and Normandy, is in fact almost inconceivable today. D-Day (and the larger cause of which it was such a central event) could only occur in the way in which it did in a culture in which duty, service, loyalty, and a constant consciousness of the common good still existed as values to be honored and lived - when preserving "our Republic, our religion, and our civilization" still mattered and when citizens still had "Faith in each other" and could be imagined to be less distracted by "temporal matters of but fleeting moment."

How have we, the beneficiaries of D-Day, become instead societies in perpetual search for safety and self-realization, the very opposite of the moral and cultural values that made D-Day both possible and successful?

[Photo: Queen Elizabeth II and visiting world leaders commemorate the 75th anniversary of D-Day at Portsmouth, England, yesterday.]