Always Remember

This is the weekend that we dedicate to honoring our dead. It  started in the US after the Civil War principally in the Confederate states as a way to honor their fallen soldiers. Many people soon realized that giving the honor only to Confederate soldiers was a problem for reasons that should be obvious so it changed from Decoration Day and then changed again to Memorial Day and then changed again when federal holidays changed so that people could have longer weekends. If I seem to be a little disengaged it's because the holidays shouldn't simply be holidays or the start of summer or any of the frivolous sales that may have now fallen by the wayside.

Decoration Day wasn't initially just for Confederate dead but was a pretty common practice in the South to go to cemeteries and clean up the graves of their ancestors and decorate with the new spring flowers, etc. The whole military purpose was a later usurpation of the original but there were obviously plenty of dead soldiers on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line and as they got older and died off the whole veneration part of the ritual became a bigger deal, politically and socially.

I really don't want to get down in the weeds here about how it started and how it evolved. I am definitely not of the bumper sticker crowd or the flag waving crowd. Is everyone who died a hero? That is unlikely and improbable but all military dead whether they were heroes or not, were someone's sons or daughters and deserve remembrance all the time, not just on one day. My mother, who has been dead herself for 30 years, always mourned her first boyfriend, Henry, who left Flushing, NY, to join the RAF and ended up dying of pneumonia in the early days of WWII because his plane was shot down and he ended up in the English Channel from which he was rescued but then died in hospital. Was Henry a hero? I guess that depends on the definition but Henry certainly deserves respect. My mother left the comfort of a reasonably good life to go to the south Pacific and serve in the Red Cross. Back in those days no one thought of those women as heroes though they certainly risked their lives in multiple ways helping the men who fought. Were they heroes?
 
Trump decided to play golf this weekend. I understand that he intends to go to Baltimore on Memorial Day even though the mayor of Baltimore has asked him not to. I am pretty sure that the golf is the more important part of Trump's weekend just as I am sure that Trump has gone to Camp David two weekends in a row to tune up his golf game. And yes, there is no golf "course" at Camp David, but there is a delightful hole designed by Bobby Jones that includes four tee locations, perfect for Trump to tune up before hitting his own course, once again at taxpayers' expense as the Secret Service must travel with him. No one in Trump's family, past or present and probably future, has ever served in any country's military let alone the country he lives in now.

Remember your own family members.Think of the sacrifices they made and then think of Trump playing golf on your dime.

100,000 Americans dead of Covid19 on Trump's watch. Please remember.