Memorial Day (Root Word: "Memory")

Memorial Day (Root word: “Memory”)

Not the most recognized holiday of the year and certainly not the most  respected.  Memorial Day is more of a benchmark start to summer than a real holiday.  More like Black Friday is to the shopping season than the 4^th of July is to patriotism.  But it’s a good day.

Most of us in Dixie have forgotten that Memorial Day was originally designated as a day to honor the Union dead from the Civil War.  Seems the South, especially Richmond, was doing such a good job honoring the boys who fell for the ‘lost cause’ that the North felt obligated to honor their own. I wasn’t around, but I suspect Memorial Day got little notice down here prior to making it a day honoring all war dead.  That’s the way it should be.

Wars are terrible and I have never personally worn our country’s uniform past ROTC at AHS.  But they are such critical benchmarks that they tend to mark our centuries more clearly than almost any other event.  Old southern architecture is considered antebellum (before the war).  What would these buildings be called if there had been no Civil War?  Even the Great Depression happened ‘between the wars’ and everyone knows what that means.  The finest residential buildings in New York are still the pre-war buildings referring to those built before WWII.  To me the Vietnam War seems to delineate a period of innocence from a period of experimentation and change.  And almost every important financial statistic seems to carry the suffix ‘since the war’; meaning World War II, (The housing bust was the greatest financial calamity since the war!).  This type of benchmarking tends to create a since of going back such a long, long time. 

But has it been such a long, long time?  In my simple mind, things are running
counter-intuitive.  The older I get, the closer I feel to ancient events.  I graduated high school only 25 years after WWII ended but my daughter graduated more than 35 years after we evacuated Saigon.  That recent war, the Vietnam one, is much farther from our children’s psyche than WWII is from my generation’s and at the time, I thought WWII was one hundred million years ago.  Does anyone else feel that way?

And now, as we recognize the 150^th anniversary of the Civil War, that conflict seems to be getting closer too.  My brothers and sister are grandparents and
we don’t feel that old.  But our own grandparents knew many Civil War veterans and even former slaves.  That fact didn’t matter when you’re young because your grandparents were so damned old they probably knew Moses, too.  Things change, your perspective is altered, when you stand in another man’s shoes. 
Just imagine; my grandparents, who I knew well, had conversations with
people who fought in that most defining of American wars.  It just doesn’t seem so far away anymore.

Europe seems to mark their time by some royal reference.  I guess the British know when the Elizabethan, Edwardian or Victorian period was if they studied their own history.  But we don’t really care.  And the French with their reigns of various Louis’s and Napoleon’s appear intentionally confusing to us Americans.  Maybe that’s the only real benefit of remembering wars in this country.  They serve as calendar points to help us get our bearings.

But of course not.  Remembering wars is a way to recognize the suffering, valor and patriotism that so many American’s have endured.  The ultimate sacrifices of war have not touched too many of my immediate family, thank you God.  But it does not mean that Memorial Day should not be important to me.  No one reading this need look too far to find a loved one honored on this day.   I am
very proud to be an American on this Memorial Day.