Today is Memorial Day, actually today is the day after, but I wrote it on Memorial Day. It wasn’t always called Memorial Day, in fact, my mother always called it Decoration Day, and in Kansas where she grew up, it was a day of remembrance for those who had died in our nation's service, and to decorate their graves. There are stories in my family from the depression era about gathering hollyhocks, which grew by the house, and yucca blossoms, which grew in the pasture, and taking them to the graveyard to decorate her ancestors graves, those who fought in the Civil War, and The Great War. It was a big deal then. Hollyhock and yucca were about the only flowers that could survive the Kansas dustbowl days, when grasshoppers & drought took most everything else that bloomed, my mom would tell me. After decorating the graves they would eat cold fried chicken, and boiled potatoes and make a day of it out at the cemetery.
Memorial Day doesn’t seem to have the meaning it once had. Part of me wonders if that was just the period, these days there is so many more distractions, and the people remembered are so many generations back, and we have not told their story enough. We are a people who like memorials, who seek to feel something beyond ourselves. In almost every town, in every state, there are memorials. Sometimes they are to people who have gone on, we call them cemeteries, graveyards, or memorial parks. But other times they seek to remember greater events, like battles, wars, or places where a great many people died. Who can visit places like Gettysburg, Ground Zero, or the Vietnam Memorial, and not feel the mass (or weight of the souls lost there) that point to a greater beyond, an unimaginable sacrifice. In ancient times people remembered too. One time in the Bible, in the book of Samuel there is an account of a great battle against the Philistines, when only by God’s protection were the Israelites not slaughtered. Twenty years earlier, on that very battlefield, the Philistines had slaughtered the Israelites and took their Ark. But on that day, at this place called Ebenizer, on the same battle field, Israel called upon the LORD defeated the Philistines and so to remember, a memorial stone was erected by Samuel. The Bible says: Then Samuel took a stone and set on end, and named it Ebenezer; for he said, "Thus far the LORD has helped us."
I like that perspective on memorial: thus far the LORD has helped us. It recalls me of who came before us, what they might have hoped for, who we can still hope to become, and of course their strength: thus far the LORD has helped us. Their sacrifice; our duty; God’s help.
I’ve seen a trend lately that I am having trouble quantifying. The trend is in these sort of remembrance -infomercials whose point seems to be to evoke an emotional response fueled by a pinch of guilt and unarticulated anger. Sometimes they come in the form of emails, forwarded from my Dad, or short clips seen during political campaigns, or just passed around on YouTube. Topics are memorial-like, for example, September 11, returning Veterans, rage against the government (you pick the policy), or how the news media is biased. I’m not completely questioning the validity of the topics, but I am wondering about the point of effort. I watch and feel something stir, but it is an internal stirring, not the call to action kind. It doesn’t feel like a movement like I am connected to anything larger than myself and these things don’t ask me to do anything more than to just forward this on, or visit this website. It is almost seems like the whole point is to evoke a feeling and the content of the remembrance-infomercials is secondary to asking people to forward it on, and to feel guilty when we don’t. As I said I am having trouble quantifying this; I don’t know that to do with it. Part of me questions the data, is it accurate? Part of me questions the source, what is their agenda? Part of me wonders about the person sending it, why to me?
And yes, I realize that I this blog entry has the same trouble as these remembrance-omercials.
To your point on the infomercial emails, maybe the point is to stir us to inaction. Rather than allowing people to get riled up to change things we get riled up inside, feel good about being riled up and forwarding that email on. Yup we did our job!
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