There were a lot of memes on FB over the last weekend, reminding us that Memorial Day isn't about long weekends or shopping or partying...and this is true.
However.
Some of us remember when Memorial Day was May 30. Period. On whatever day it fell, businesses closed down. People traveled to the cemetery to decorate the graves of the dead -- to clean the stone, to plant fresh flowers, to pause, to remember. Not just the war dead, but all the dead. My grandmother used to call it Decoration Day. Please note, this was AFTER World War II. People gathered with their families to remember the dead, and because it was often the first time they were getting nice weather, they would do it outside, with a picnic. It was often the case that families would have picnics in the park-like cemetery settings.
Somehow, someone decided that it was more efficient to make holidays "moveable feasts" -- to have them fall on a Monday because it was more convenient to just take a long weekend rather than work for a day or two, take one day off, then work another couple of days. As for stores -- well, if you work retail you don't get holidays, ESPECIALLY in grocery.
So how can you expect people to honor the root of a holiday if you can't even mark it as a holiday? I have no problem with stores being open on Sunday or Christmas or Easter -- those are religious holidays and I don't expect people to honor them just because I do. But I DO take exception to making national observances like Labor Day, Martin Luther King, Jr Day (NOT "MLK DAY" or "King Day"), and Presidents' Day and especially Memorial Day and the Fourth of July into shopping extravaganzas. It does, of course, underscore the observation of President Coolidge (? - Hoover?) that "the business of America is business." It's a pretty sad way to remember the founding principle of the holiday as summed up in the document associated with Memorial Day, the Gettysburg Address: It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the
unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It
is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us --
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for
which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve
that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall
have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people,
for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Government of the people. By the people. For the people.
I am not a complete iconoclast. I am not anti-business or anti-commerce. Businesses provide income and goods that people need. They deserve to make a profit. But I don't believe they should be the central consideration, the ruling ideal of a culture or a country. I suspect that many of our honored dead these days are sacrificed on the altar of profit, that we generate wars and conflicts to maintain businesses that are in the business of war and that those who profit from them are working overtly and covertly to make sure that there is always someone who needs their goods. Too often we wrap profit in a flag and call it patriotism, even as those who profit the most are undermining our communities by underpaying workers, moving jobs out of the country, and moving headquarters to avoid taxes.
And, I might add, government by of Business, by Business, for Business is not only the antithesis of capitalism as laid out by Adam Smith, but it is a grotesque parody of the ideal for which our sons and daughters have died.
