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I am momentarily digressing from outerwear posts in light of this solemn holiday and I hope this meets approval in this section of TFL.
Everyone should do whatever they want on Memorial Day and those who suggest spending the day in mourning aren't in touch with the essence of what those who died would think; it's for such freedom that those who gave all so did. But there is a balance, too, and I hope this strikes that balance:
Those who fell in combat rarely sacrificed themselves for any lofty or sentimental notions of our way of life back home, mom or apple pie – they fought and died for something very simple – the immediacy of self-preservation and their buddies with whom they had bonded as only those who have lived through the array of emotions found in combat can ever know.
The holiday marks the unofficial entry of summer. Americans will enjoy the extra day off, have parties, do chores, grill burgers, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with the reason we have this national holiday. This free day comes with a price tag, however, and the bill was paid by hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never again enjoy what we are about to.
Memorial Day is set aside to memorialize those who paid the supreme sacrifice for the freedoms we take for granted. Those who perished in combat, for the most part, were very much in the prime of their lives. For them, they had a world of infinite possibilities still to enjoy, living in that mercurial moment we who are now well past age 25 know all too well. These Americans this day honors rarely left this world peacefully: fear, stress, and anxiety all were forever tugging at their minds, living a daily existence with overwhelming responsibility in climates, surroundings and under conditions most of us cannot fathom and will never know. And their deaths were commonly violent in horrible ways. Not the deaths we know performed by actors in movies, but mortality reached through flesh-searing fire, agonizing, lung-bursting drowning, bone-shattering and disfiguring bullet wounds, or from limbs, entrails and heads jaggedly ripped from the body in a viscera of blood and cordite, often striking and sometimes wounding their brothers-in-arms in this ghastly dismemberment.
The responsibility to remember those who so died is now ours, though how we choose to do this is personal. We can still grill burgers, forget about our jobs for a day, seed the lawn or wax the car. Our dead lost in combat would probably feel a bit sheepish in suggesting they must be remembered, and they’d surely be here with us if they could, doing those very same things we’re about to partake in. But they would just as surely be thinking about their comrades who didn’t come home and who can’t loaf the day away this time each year. So, just for a short moment this Memorial Day, take the time to just be and not do anything. Be grateful to live in America and be thankful if you are among the lucky to have been shielded from the carnage of combat while others paid the bill.
Everyone should do whatever they want on Memorial Day and those who suggest spending the day in mourning aren't in touch with the essence of what those who died would think; it's for such freedom that those who gave all so did. But there is a balance, too, and I hope this strikes that balance:
Those who fell in combat rarely sacrificed themselves for any lofty or sentimental notions of our way of life back home, mom or apple pie – they fought and died for something very simple – the immediacy of self-preservation and their buddies with whom they had bonded as only those who have lived through the array of emotions found in combat can ever know.
The holiday marks the unofficial entry of summer. Americans will enjoy the extra day off, have parties, do chores, grill burgers, and a myriad of other things that have nothing to do with the reason we have this national holiday. This free day comes with a price tag, however, and the bill was paid by hundreds of thousands of Americans who will never again enjoy what we are about to.
Memorial Day is set aside to memorialize those who paid the supreme sacrifice for the freedoms we take for granted. Those who perished in combat, for the most part, were very much in the prime of their lives. For them, they had a world of infinite possibilities still to enjoy, living in that mercurial moment we who are now well past age 25 know all too well. These Americans this day honors rarely left this world peacefully: fear, stress, and anxiety all were forever tugging at their minds, living a daily existence with overwhelming responsibility in climates, surroundings and under conditions most of us cannot fathom and will never know. And their deaths were commonly violent in horrible ways. Not the deaths we know performed by actors in movies, but mortality reached through flesh-searing fire, agonizing, lung-bursting drowning, bone-shattering and disfiguring bullet wounds, or from limbs, entrails and heads jaggedly ripped from the body in a viscera of blood and cordite, often striking and sometimes wounding their brothers-in-arms in this ghastly dismemberment.
The responsibility to remember those who so died is now ours, though how we choose to do this is personal. We can still grill burgers, forget about our jobs for a day, seed the lawn or wax the car. Our dead lost in combat would probably feel a bit sheepish in suggesting they must be remembered, and they’d surely be here with us if they could, doing those very same things we’re about to partake in. But they would just as surely be thinking about their comrades who didn’t come home and who can’t loaf the day away this time each year. So, just for a short moment this Memorial Day, take the time to just be and not do anything. Be grateful to live in America and be thankful if you are among the lucky to have been shielded from the carnage of combat while others paid the bill.
