Memorial Day: Molasses Monday

I'm a vet, lucky to be in and out of the Army between our various "Wars," officially "military engagements." Formally, I'm a Vietnam Era Vet, since we began messing with the natives there while I was in the Army, and our "intervention" escalated while I was in the (luckily for me) "Inactive Reserve."

Memorial Day began as Decoration Day, inaugurated by freedmen after the Civil War, celebrating their freedom from slavery, and memorializing the fallen soldiers who helped make that happen.

To me, Memorial Day is a three-day weekend. Even that is less meaningful to me, now, because I'm "retired." No one but Social Security pays me anything for work rendered. So, I'm no more off work on Memorial Day than I was today, Sunday, when I mowed for several hours just to insure that people who come here--a small event space with land--won't be overwhelmingly infested by disease-bearing ticks. On Memorial Day, I'll finish mowing the trails.

All Memorial Day means to me in practical terms is that I won't get mail, and any official business I have to attend to, will have to wait until Tuesday.

But a friend of mine, who's running for Congress as an Occupy-Democrat against a more traditional Democrat in a primary next month, sees Memorial Day as an opportunity to appear to a lot of people in town parades all over the district.

However, there is a military dimension to Memorial Day in larger cities, where military units will parade down main streets.

My experience in the Army in Turkey (electronic surveillance of Soviet missile testing was our mission), led me to realize that our military institution was imperial by nature and racist in its relations to host nationals--unless they were white, like the Bavarians I lived amongst in my second tour. Turks were sufficiently foreign and dark enough that my fellow soldiers spoke of them much the way white southerners used to speak of black people. There was even an equivalent to the N-word to designate Turks: abie, a contraction of the Turkish word, agabey, meaning friend. That's not what it meant, then, to the American soldiers.

So, I'm chary of Memorial Day celebration: it has become a celebration of Empire, when politicians wax eloquent about our "heroic men and women" who paid the ultimate price for "their country."

"Their country" has not been in danger of military attack since Pearl Harbor. The last war in which American soldiers gave their lives really defending "their country," was the Civil War. Memorial Day celebrates war dead, who helped the US win Empire, which is now bankrupting us.

I mourn the war dead, though: what a waste!

Think how wealthy the US would be if we didn't spend about $750 billion a year on our military establishment, more than most countries in the world, combined.