Memorial Day Archives - Page 2 of 3

Community Service

Civil Works Administration improved roads, constructed bridges, upgraded airports and repaired pipelines.

“Musing”, in Rogerspeak, means that I have some idea, but nothing nailed down yet.

I spent part of Mother’s Day musing over this kernel of a thought. It was fed by the dire needs of this country, plus noticing that an increasing number of students are taking a “gap year, either right after high school or during their college years.

Also, there’s a bill in Congress that would require women to sign up for the military draft. Yet, it seemed unfortunate that the only area that seems of value culturally in the United States is military service.

So why not have some sort of community service? Perhaps it’d be fashioned, in part, on some of those programs in the 1930s during the Great Depression under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. .

The goal of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was to preserve the country’s natural resources. This meant working in the parks and forests performing tasks such as “planting trees, building flood barriers, fighting fires, and maintaining roads and trails.” It seems that fires and floods have become ubiquitous each season, stretching local resources thin.

The Civil Works Administration (CWA) improved roads, constructed bridges, upgraded airports, and restored pipelines. EVERY SINGLE ONE of those tasks is needed. The aging infrastructure is in dire need. External security at airports needs to be built up. And Flint, Michigan is hardly the only place that needs pipes replaced.

Perhaps more assistants to teachers could be found, more arts and music, as well as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Older people given companions – I’m sure there’s more.

And surely it should include support for the tragedy that there are homeless veterans. There are models n the country – in Utah, for instance – of alleviating this problem by providing housing for all, not just more dignified but much CHEAPER than leaving them on the streets, without access to proper medical care and benefits. It could be a source of employment for them as well.

Yes, as Jon Stewart alludes to, having a public service component might add to that sense of the collective. It feels that many of us are in our little electronic pods.

Any thoughts on other projects and how this all might work? I know some will say we cannot afford it. We also cannot afford bridge collapses and levees being breached, homeless warriors, and overtested yet undereducated children.

“Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.” — Howard Zinn (Boston Globe, 1976)

Michael Rivest on Vietnam

Memorial Day 2015: war is failure

“It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60.”

There was a time when I thought there were bad guys and good guys, and they were very easily distinguishable.

But now I think war is failure. Even a “just war” may be, at very best, the least bad outcome. And usually, just a bad outcome, with war profiteers (Blackwater, or whatever they’re calling themselves now). Pope Francis got it right this month: “Many powerful people don’t want peace because they live off war.”

Any American born since 1984 has spent at least half of his or her life with the country at war. My life percentage is only about 40%.

We go to war in Iraq. Some of us thought it was a mistake at the time. Others discover it later, realizing we were lied to. Now, the calls by some to go war with Iran ring hollow.

Unintended consequences of war: My Lai in Vietnam, Abu Gharib in Iraq, to name just two during my lifetime. I highly recommend Graphic Novels About Consequences and Horrors of War by Meryl Jaffe.

On this Memorial Day, I also suggest Demobilized in the USA: Why There Is No Massive Antiwar Movement; I.F. Stone, the urge to serve, and remembrance of wars past:

Among the eeriest things about reading Stone’s Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia coverage, 14 years into the next century, is how resonantly familiar so much of what he wrote still seems, how twenty-first-century it all is. It turns out that the national security state hasn’t just been repeating things they’ve done unsuccessfully for the last 13 years, but for the last 60. [Compare, for instance, Laos and Iraq.]

But if much in the American way of war remains dismally familiar some five decades later, one thing of major significance has changed, something you can see regularly in I.F. Stone’s Weekly but not in our present world. Thirteen years after our set of disastrous wars started, where is the massive antiwar movement, including an army in near revolt and a Congress with significant critics in significant positions?

If, so many years into the disastrous war on terror, the Afghan War that never ends, and most recently Iraq War 3.0 and Syria War 1.0, there is no significant antiwar movement in this country, you can thank the only fit of brilliance the national security state has displayed. It successfully drummed us out of service. The sole task it left to Americans, 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, was the ludicrous one of repeatedly thanking the troops for their service, something that would have been inconceivable in the 1950s or 1960s because you would, in essence, have been thanking yourself.

Memorial Day: revisionist history

Jesus taught us to give comfort to people with dying loved ones. He also gave comfort to the Centurion (Matthew 8).

Almost a year ago, Demeur sent me an article about the history of Memorial Day.

[Historian David] Blight’s award-winning Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) explained how three “overall visions of Civil War memory collided” in the decades after the war.

The first was the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans’ remembrances and the politics of Radical Reconstruction, in which the Civil War was understood principally as a war for the destruction of slavery and the liberation of African Americans to achieve full citizenship.

The second was the reconciliationist vision, ostensibly less political, which focused on honoring the dead on both sides, respecting their sacrifice, and the reunion of the country.

The third was the white supremacist vision, which was either openly pro-Confederate or at least despising of Reconstruction as “Black rule” in the South.

Over the late 1800s and the early 1900s, in the context of Jim Crow and the complete subordination of Black political participation, the second and third visions largely combined. The emancipationist version of the Civil War, and the heroic participation of African Americans in their own liberation, was erased from popular culture, the history books and official commemoration.

Interesting. Not surprising, but interesting to read about revisionist history.
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Last year, when I bewailed what I consider the theological justification for war as anti-Christian, anti-Jesus, and utterly false glorification of war, Chris Honeycutt noted:

I’d say that Memorial Day is 100% a holiday in the real Christian spirit, just like Jesus would want.
Other people make it about celebrating the wars. But it’s really about remembering the soldiers who died.
Everyone who served lost people and had no time to stop and grieve. The war kept coming.
Jesus taught us to give comfort to people with dying loved ones. He also gave comfort to the Centurion (Matthew 8).
So… yeah. Jesus was pretty clear about the war issue. Still think he’d think Memorial Day was a great idea.

I think she might very well be right. Jesus cared for those whose hearts were heavy-laden.

So let us remember our lost ones, even as we redouble our efforts for peace.

Do you know who does really nice Memorial Day posts? Jaquandor. Here’s his post from last year. And here’s a post he did during the last Advent which feels applicable today.
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The Gun Jumpers.

Memorial Day, 2013: WWJD

There are no goodies for being right, no satisfaction in “I told you so.”

I’m in my church book study a few months back. We are reading Jesus for President, VERY slowly, for it has much to offer.

Much to my surprise, I get really ticked off, though not at anyone in the room. It was the re-realization that the war in Iraq, indeed many wars, are in stark contrast with Christian ideals. Yet Christianists seemed to have embraced war as some sort of Christo-American manifest destiny.

It surely didn’t help that this was around the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war when I was also reading about:
The lies that predicated the war.
22 veterans per day commit suicide, yet the vets are hamstrung by bureaucracy in getting the aid they need.
Not only did over 4000 American soldiers die in the conflict but over 3,400 contractors also did as well. This hardly ever got reported but was a clever way to diminish how bad the war really was. And that’s just on the US side.
A dying veteran writing on behalf of thousands in an open letter. Sample paragraph: “I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation, and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done.”

And for what? A decade of war that has devastated a nation.

My opposition to this war I have well-documented. I was one of literally millions who, for a moral and substantive reason, rejected the application of U.S. imperial power abroad.

Here’s the problem for me. There are no goodies for being right, no satisfaction in “I told you so.” Former U.N. Ambassador and Congressman Andrew Young was quoted as saying that the United States has “got to have better intelligence and better diplomacy because wars don’t work.”

As we remember our fallen soldiers today, may we be ever vigilant in our efforts to try to keep as many of our warriors alive as possible.
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Interesting job video on the kids.gov site: Prosthetist, who makes artificial arms and legs for individuals who’ve lost their limbs. Nice couple-minute piece.

Memorial Day History

It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still often called Decoration Day.

Mostly from here, because people seem to have no idea of the genesis of Memorial Day:

Three years after the Civil War ended, on May 5, 1868, the head of an organization of Union veterans — the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) — established Decoration Day as a time for the nation to decorate the graves of the war dead with flowers. Maj. Gen. John A. Logan declared that Decoration Day should be observed on May 30. It is believed that the date was chosen because flowers would be in bloom all over the country. The first large observance was held that year at Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

A long weekend!

The ceremonies centered around the mourning-draped veranda of the Arlington mansion, once the home of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Various Washington officials, including Gen. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, presided over the ceremonies. After speeches, children from the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Orphan Home and members of the GAR made their way through the cemetery, strewing flowers on both Union and Confederate graves, reciting prayers, and singing hymns.

Shopping!

Local Observances Claim To Be First Local springtime tributes to the Civil War dead already had been held in various places. One of the first occurred in Columbus, Miss., on April 25, 1866, when a group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers who had fallen in battle at Shiloh. Nearby were the graves of Union soldiers, neglected because they were the enemy. Disturbed at the sight of the bare graves, the women placed some of their flowers on those graves, as well.

Summer has begun!

Today, cities in the North and the South claim to be the birthplace of Memorial Day in 1866. Both Macon and Columbus, Ga., claim the title, as well as Richmond, Va. The village of Boalsburg, Pa., claims it began there two years earlier. A stone in a Carbondale, Ill., cemetery carries the statement that the first Decoration Day ceremony took place there on April 29, 1866. Carbondale was the wartime home of Gen. Logan. Approximately 25 places have been named in connection with the origin of Memorial Day, many of them in the South where most of the war dead were buried.

Family get-togethers!

Official Birthplace Declared In 1966, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson declared Waterloo, N.Y., the “birthplace” of Memorial Day. There, a ceremony on May 5, 1866, honored local veterans who had fought in the Civil War. Businesses closed and residents flew flags at half-staff. Supporters of Waterloo’s claim say earlier observances in other places were either informal, not community-wide, or one-time events.

Heavy traffic!

By the end of the 19th century, Memorial Day ceremonies were being held on May 30 throughout the nation. State legislatures passed proclamations designating the day, and the Army and Navy adopted regulations for proper observance at their facilities. It was not until after World War I, however, that the day was expanded to honor those who have died in all American wars. In 1971, Memorial Day was declared a national holiday by an act of Congress, though it is still often called Decoration Day. It was then also placed on the last Monday in May, as were some other federal holidays.The origins of special services to honor those who die in war can be found in antiquity. The Athenian leader Pericles offered a tribute to the fallen heroes of the Peloponnesian War over 24 centuries ago that could be applied today to the 1.1 million Americans who have died in the nation’s wars: “Not only are they commemorated by columns and inscriptions, but there dwells also an unwritten memorial of them, graven not on stone but in the hearts of men.”

Big movie releases!

To ensure the sacrifices of America’s fallen heroes are never forgotten, in December 2000, the U.S. Congress passed and the president signed into law “The National Moment of Remembrance Act,” P.L. 106-579, creating the White House Commission on the National Moment of Remembrance. The commission’s charter is to “encourage the people of the United States to give something back to their country, which provides them so much freedom and opportunity” by encouraging and coordinating commemorations in the United States of Memorial Day and the National Moment of Remembrance.

Let’s eat outside!

The National Moment of Remembrance encourages all Americans to pause wherever they are at 3 p.m. local time on Memorial Day for a minute of silence to remember and honor those who have died in service to the nation. As Moment of Remembrance founder Carmella LaSpada states: “It’s a way we can all help put the memorial back in Memorial Day.”
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Vice President Joe Biden and others spoke to survivors of fallen military members.

Union College hosts a milestone for ‘Taps’; “School graduate penned song 150 years ago; concert helps celebrate”; 24 notes

On Memorial Day Weekend, America Reckons with Torture by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship