Tannishblog

It seems we’re supposed to get teary-eyed and maudlin over the Memorial Day holiday. Good Americans are to trot out their dusty flags and their threadbare national pride for display. We’ll open our Sunday papers to read OpEds about how free we are and how this directly relates to our fallen soldiers, and - most importantly – how we plebeians should be grateful for the generations of American warriors we’ve bred. In honor of the fallen, we expect to express our gratefulness by shopping, dirtying up our GrillMasters, guzzling bear and watching baseball – all in the sacred name of America.

Let us not forget this weekend that doing so is a right, a freedom. Our neighbors will expect us to act a certain way, say certain things, not to do so risks ostracism or worse. They might sell our phone number to the NSA. Therefore smile and nod to the fellow at his barbecue beyond your fence line, raise your Budweiser to the great red, white and blue and try to forget how this expression of freedom is tainted by enforcement.

Perhaps this is not the time to tear up this page with a rant about the underlying cultural assumptions pertaining to this holiday. I do wish you a restful weekend, so I refrain. Perhaps another day will suffice. Instead, partly because I’m lazy and wish to play a bit myself, I will re-post last years Memorial Day poem as a placeholder for my ranting. No sense not kicking the dead dog, he won’t mind….

Have a safe holiday.

In Memorandum
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Give homage to our precious dead,
All those who do remain.
For policy and rhetoric,
For senseless death, in vain.
For principles and politics,
We send our young to die.
A grieving mother’s tear-stained face,
So plainly wonders why.

Send tribute to our newly lost,
Our love, it cannot die.
Kneel beside their fresh-turned graves,
Beneath the perfect sky.
Question all that brings such pain,
That God and Man forfend.
And send a prayer into the void,
Such folly soon will end.

Pay respects to Ideologues,
Who send your youth to die.
Why kiss the Ring of Priviledge,
To kiss their souls goodbye?
The Evil that is on this Earth,
Resides in any man,
Who sends our young to die for him,
As if that is God’s plan.

To die in the name of Freedom,
Is viewed as lofty praise.
Is politics superior
To the children that we raise?
At what point will we look about,
To see what is insane:
To kill in the name of Freedom,
Devalues what is gained.