Truly Worth Honoring
Today is Memorial Day. In a park near my home is a plaque that reads:
We honor all those who fought for our community.
There is probably a similar plaque near you. I would be more proud to live in a community with a plaque that read:
We honor those who fought against our community when it was wrong.
As a Quaker, I have a big problem with holidays like Memorial Day, since I'm convinced that war is always against God's will, and, moreover, that such holidays are rituals of a civic religion that is in opposition to the Gospel.
I can't put my thought as pithily as you did, but it seems to me that honor is due to those individuals who, in accordance with the measure of the Light they were granted, acted as they thought necessary to preserve their community.
But then you should honor your community as well, even though it was wrong, because it was opposing another community when that community was wrong. So you'd be honoring both warring camps, equally, simply because each made war against a community in the wrong. Ad absurdum, you might honor both the Nazis and the Soviets. It seems to me that neither community should be honored -- though, per Truman, we might want to arm whichever side is losing so they'll kill as many of each other as possible. We should only honor those who fight for or against our community when they do so for the right reason.