It’s almost time to ‘start your barbecues!" as Memorial Day, for many the start of summer, is just around the calendar corner. Before you start packing for picnics, or the shore or taking in the Rotary Carnival that starts tomorrow night at Howard T. Brown Park and goes through Monday, I’d like to offer what passes for thoughts from previous years for Memorial Day.
(I'm old enough to remember when we observed/celebrated holidays where they fell on the calendar. I'm not sure we’re not better off with a return to earlier times, but my old codger is probably showing. Sorry.)
Meanwhile, I'm probably the first to wish you the best for your Memorial Day holiday, which is observed this Monday. There’s a parade, complete with a marching band stepping off at noon from the Cathedral of Saint Patrick to Chelsea Parade followed by a one clock ceremony.
Earlier, actually at ten, at The Memorial Park in Taftville, around the corner from the Knights of Columbus, there’s a remembrance service dedicated to Army Private Victor Davis, a Taftville resident who died in a Japanese POW camp on 30 June 1943 after surviving the Bataan Death March.
(I'm old enough to remember when we observed/celebrated holidays where they fell on the calendar. I'm not sure we’re not better off with a return to earlier times, but my old codger is probably showing. Sorry.)
Meanwhile, I'm probably the first to wish you the best for your Memorial Day holiday, which is observed this Monday. There’s a parade, complete with a marching band stepping off at noon from the Cathedral of Saint Patrick to Chelsea Parade followed by a one clock ceremony.
Earlier, actually at ten, at The Memorial Park in Taftville, around the corner from the Knights of Columbus, there’s a remembrance service dedicated to Army Private Victor Davis, a Taftville resident who died in a Japanese POW camp on 30 June 1943 after surviving the Bataan Death March.
The Taftville VFW Post 2212 and the American Legion Post 104, together with the Norwich Area Veterans Council, do a wonderful job of organizing this annual event, as they do with so many others throughout the year. I always find time to attend and I hope you will too.
If tradition is any indicator, there will be some remarks by local civic leaders and those who served in uniform around the world in both war and peace and who lived to come home and tell about it, as well as words of comfort from a clergy person.
Maybe you'll look around at the metal folding chairs, all neatly aligned facing the podium and wonder how many of those who were there last year made it this year. The memory of sacrifice only survives until the last person who remembers those sacrifices has passed.
Maybe you'll look around at the metal folding chairs, all neatly aligned facing the podium and wonder how many of those who were there last year made it this year. The memory of sacrifice only survives until the last person who remembers those sacrifices has passed.
But in the Brave New World, it's long since become 'what have you done for us lately?' And new enemies, far more formidable than any we have encountered before, require vigilance and sacrifice.
We've become heavily entrenched in and entranced with our own beliefs and are less interested than at any time since the Nativist movement in what anyone disagreeing with us has to say about anything.
Perhaps as a reminder to take into the upcoming holiday and beyond, I can offer the seventy (and four) words which closed Abraham Lincoln's second Inaugural Address.
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."
-bill kenny
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