WE INTERRUPT your festive three-day weekend to remind that today is actually about death and sacrifice.
Memorial Day, officially Monday, May 26 this year, is a day of remembrance for those who died in our nation's service. Those have been many, and the long list is still growing. Indeed, our ability to celebrate any holidays at all -- whether of historical or religious origin -- is pretty much the end result of the oh-so-many who were willing to sacrifice their lives in order to preserve them, our way of life, our form of government and our liberties.
This region has special reason to pay more attention to the day's true meaning, even beyond on its own long list of those deserving to be memorialized. Nearby Kingston in Bartow County, where historical markers often seem to outnumber the highway signs, has a legitimate if disputed claim to being the first place in the nation to create such an observance back in the spring of 1865.
It's a story worth retelling even though, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed Waterloo, N.Y., as the birthplace of Memorial Day. Their informal event was held a full year after Kingston's, on May 5, 1866, and limited to honoring the Union soldiers who fell in the War Between the States.
IN KINGSTON, it is recorded, local women started a spring rite of decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers with flowers as the town's cemetery grew due to the community being a military hospital location. In the spring of 1865, Kingston then being occupied by Union forces that also used it as a hospital location, they asked permission from the military commander to do so again. They were reportedly told that they could so long as all the hundreds of soldiers' graves -- Confederate and Union -- were decorated.
They agreed, and have continued the tradition ever since even though only two Union soldiers remain there, the rest having been relocated to the National Cemetery in Marietta. The graves of two known Confederates -- and 249 unknowns -- also remain there to be decorated annually in what is considered the longest continuous such observance in the nation -- as well as the first to include "everybody."
Many other communities, in North and South alike, stake similar claims, all of them having unofficial events preceding the first officially declared observance in 1868. Originally known as "Decoration Day," which has a broader meaning in the South beyond just honoring the fallen of our wars, it was not until 1971 that it was locked in as a federal holiday in all states on the last Monday in May.
THE CURRENT American lifestyle penchant for taking full advantage of "days off," and particularly so those creating a "long weekend," has caused Memorial Day to lose much of its original importance and somber demeanor.
And as the Web site usmemorialday.org sadly notes:
"Traditional observance of Memorial day has diminished over the years. Many Americans nowadays have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At many cemeteries, the graves of the fallen are increasingly ignored, neglected. Most people no longer remember the proper flag etiquette for the day. While there are towns and cities that still hold Memorial Day parades, many have not held a parade in decades. Some people think the day is for honoring any and all dead, and not just those fallen in service to our country."
[Rome's parade continues and will start at 3 p.m. down Broad Street to Myrtle Hill.]
At Kingston, whose women may have started the whole thing, the Woman's Club continues the ritual every year. In Floyd County, particularly at Rome's Myrtle Hill Cemetery and in Shannon, major commemorative services continue.
But, let's face it, most Americans spend the time at the lake, round the barbecue in the backyard, watching the big auto race. Remembering their honored dead is not the day's priority any longer.
ONE CAN STILL find an offered imitation red poppy from time to time, a tradition dating back to World War I ("In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row"), but remember when everyone on the streets seemed to be wearing one?
In 2000, in an effort to restore the day's meaning, the Congress approved a "National Moment of Remembrance" at 3 p.m., local time, on Memorial Day where all Americans were to "voluntarily and informally observe in their own way a moment of remembrance and respect, pausing from whatever they are doing for a moment of silence or listening to ‘Taps'."
When's the last time you heard "Taps"?
Particularly in Northwest Georgia, where the concept of honoring the fallen may have started, far more and better should be done by this day. Those who have perished in this nation's conflicts in the past, who may well perish today in Iraq or Afghanistan, and who may give their all in the future deserve at least this.
They are, and always will be, more important than the hotdogs and beer, the burgers and soda, even those special extra moments with family and friends.
If you have today read this editorial through to its conclusion, then you have had your "Moment of Remembrance" even though it might not have been at 3 p.m. That's more time than far too many of us have spent, will spend, observing the true reason that this day exists.
THOSE HONORED today gave an entire lifetime to making this holiday possible. Certainly, we can give them back just a moment.
|
No Related links found
|
