esrosedotblog

MEMMED OUT

I don't much know what to think about any holiday but Memorial Day is one of the more puzzling.

I am sure sorry about all those dead people who fought for me. I am grateful that others did it and not me.

I feel sort of undeserving about it all. And I also feel like a lot of them died because they were sent to do the wrong thing at the wrong place at the wrong time. Just look in the news.

I read the other day that we are actually in the most peaceful time of our history. War is down and peace is up. It doesn't feel like it.

Maybe the deal is that the more peace we get to have the less sense war makes.

I know, it is not about war but about the people who died in the wars. But it is hard to separate the two.

And what about the 'enemy' dead? Am I to mourn for them too or are they excluded? Dunno. But, I mourn for them. Too many pictures of this war's grief (and too few of our own casualties?) have turned my sympathies and feelings of despair in that direction. I mourn them all. Ours, theirs and mostly, the unknowing.

When I was a kid we had school to start and then a parade to one of the three local cemeteries and then some razzamatazz with the American Legion and the VFW carrying on.

Some kid would say the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln's.

One year the kid was me. I still remember it.

Come to think of it, the words do give some relief and come close to the way I would like to feel. I guess I will read them again.

Come to think of it, we are in a sort of civil war only it is parts of the world agains other parts. And so on. A religious war?