You Can Stand Alone

Sometimes our brains play tricks on us with false associations like Santa Claus with Christmas and bunnies with Easter. Or when we talk about firing up barbecues to mark the unofficial start of summer on Memorial Day this Monday. Knowing but not apologizing for sounding like a grumpy old man, we should focus on what’s important about Memorial Day. And it doesn’t involve charcoal.

I've offered these thoughts before, and they still don’t mention baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, or a General Motors automobile. All of those are just some of what Memorial Day makes possible but should never be confused with the holiday itself.

At ten this Monday morning at The Memorial Park in Taftville, around the corner from the Knights of Columbus, there’s a remembrance service dedicated this year to Army Private First-Class David G. Phaneuf one of the twenty-three Taftville residents who gave their lives fighting in one of America's wars. Phaneuf died on February 25th, 1945, serving with the U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima.

The Peter Gallan American Legion Post 104 and the Frederick J. Sullivan Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2212 do a wonderful job of organizing this annual event. And while Taftville's Memorial Park isn't the biggest venue in the city, there's always room for those who attend and certainly room for one more. I always find time to attend, and I hope you will, too.

If tradition is any indicator, there will be remarks by local civic leaders as well as those who've served in uniform around the world in both war and peace and lived to come home to talk about it, as well as words of comfort from a member of our local clergy.

Whle there you may look around at the metal folding chairs, all neatly aligned facing the podium, and wonder how many of those who present last year lived to make it to this year. I know I do, and it catches me up short because memories of sacrifice only survive until the last person who remembers those sacrifices has passed.

But today, the mantra is 'what have you done for us lately?' And new enemies within and without, more formidable than any we have encountered before, require vigilance and sacrifice. We've become less tolerant and quicker to anger at what anyone who disagrees with us has to say. Memorial Day should remind us to believe in something bigger than ourselves.  

With apologies to Thomas Paine’s warnings about sunshine patriots and summer soldiers, these, too 'are the times to try men's (and women’s) souls.' Too many sacrificed their everything so that each of us could have something we can call our own. To be unappreciative and selfish instead of grateful and graceful for what we have is to dishonor their memories and their lives.  

As a reminder of this upcoming holiday (and beyond), let me share the seventy-four words with which Abraham Lincoln concluded his 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."
-bill kenny