Happy Memorial Day

The greeting, "Happy Memorial Day," always strikes me as ironic. I know it is intended to say "Enjoy the Holiday weekend," but it seems odd, like saying "Have a nice funeral."

Different people have different perceptions about the significance of Memorial day. To some people, it is just a holiday - a day when you get paid to stay home, drink beer and have some friends over for a cook-out. To many gardeners in northern climes, Memorial day is traditionally recognized as the day to safely plant delicate annuals such as tomato sets or other frost sensitive crops in the garden. Sun worshipers here in New England see Memorial Day as the first day of the beach season. People start heading for the Cape or other shore venues. To many coastal business people Memorial Day is thought of as the harbinger (if not the unofficial start ) of summer.

Sometimes we forget the original purpose of the day: to remember those who died in service to their country. It is hard to fathom the incredible sacrifice made by these human beings to advance a concept called liberty. Many of those who died never got to be heroes - they were killed on the beaches of Normandy before they even got a shot off, or, blasted by a roadside bomb in Iraq, or asleep in a barrack in Beirut. Still, we rightfully honor them all for going out into the world to fight "for their country."

Those of us who are lucky enough not to have our asses shot at, can opine and pontificate about the political reasons behind war, but as Cindy Sheehan has discovered, the world is a complicated place. The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend. Disillusioned by the antiwar industrial complex, the self styled attention whore is abandoning the peace movement to try and get her life back. She declares that her son "died for nothing."

In contrast, I recently saw a documentary about life in the Palestinian territory. One man was asked if he would want his son to become a militant fighter. The video showed the kid who was was 4 years old, cute and happily playing kickball with his siblings. The dad said that he would be honored to have this boy - his son - become a martyr. It was shocking and sad to think that a father could be eager to make such a sacrifice.

There was a time when some of us actually thought that peace in the world was possible. I seem to recall having that feeling very briefly when the Soviet Union collapsed. Then we discovered that the positive effect of totalitarianism was that it suppressed civil/ethnic squabbles. Without the harsh rule of an invading empire, tribes and villages will resume fighting with each other.

In one sense the kids who died in wars did not die in vain. Collectively, through their sacrifice, they probably helped to preserve a "peaceful" way of life for the rest of us - so we could go about our lives, getting and spending, having cook-outs, with uninterrupted TV programming and texting on our blackberries. We need to thank them because we are not living in dirt floor huts with government loudspeakers on every corner.

Yesterday was the commercial day-off from the workaday world. Tomorrow is the traditional observance of Memorial Day.

A day for each of us to ask ourselves "Are we willing sacrifice our lives (or those of our children) to keep religious nuts from killing each other?" Would we not be better off to just let them fight?