Here in New England we have a lot of veterans, just like everywhere else. And as elsewhere, the graves are marked with flags on Memorial Day. This year a group has once again attached flags and the names of soldiers killed-in-action to utility poles along a half-dozen miles of Route 16 in Holliston and Milford. A couple years ago the group did the same thing for the first two years of the war; but this year I didn’t see any Spanish, British, Central European, or Latin American flags — just a few Canadian flags and a Danish one. (Of course, I was driving and surely missed something.)

I understand that some think what we’re doing is tremendously valuable for the world and noble — despite its incredible mismanagement — but to me the lives associated with the hundreds of names every 50 to 100 feet along Route 16 all seem to have been wasted.