Note from The Jaundiced Eye:
From time to time I will be posting a blog post from before I was featured in Humor Times that I feel speaks to current times or has other value.
The following is one such:
Here we are celebrating another three day weekend culminating with Memorial Day, which used to be the last day in May, but is now the final Monday in that month. The will be much barbecuing of flesh both animal and, if the overcast breaks here in California, human as we indulge in our seasonal flirtation with skin cancer.
Over the next 72 hours the various cable and network channels will manage to air every single film to ever celebrate the blood orgy of warfare in the course of the last seventy years. The prevailing theme seems to be that we somehow support our living troops by glorifying the dead ones. Meanwhile, Veteran’s Day, the holiday honoring living veterans, is all but forgotten. It was not always so.
Memorial Day used to be Decoration Day, a day for healing a nation rent by the Civil War on which survivors would decorate the graves of the fallen on both sides. This practice was soon extended to all graves . It was a day to honor all of the dead. My grandmother still called it that and on May 31 we would solemnly visit the cemetery and place flowers on the graves of her husband and of my mother. Veteran’s Day was also known as Armistice Day. It honored the men who had served and the ending of a terrible war. The holiday was established when a million or so angry vets marched on Washington after being screwed out of their benefits.
Be seeing you.
- Guns…And Other Four Letter Words - February 9, 2013
- She Walks Among Us - January 27, 2013
- Notes From The Belly Of The Beast - October 21, 2012
