Venison and pinto bean + wild turkey molé tacos <>
Why do USAmericans celebrate Memorial Day?
Decoration Day started as a way to honor and mourn Union soldiers who died in the line of duty during the american civil war. Now it feels more like a cultural way to mark the beginning of summer… No white before Memorial Day, wait to put plants out till after Memorial Day… Cookouts and fireworks, much like Independence Day.
I sat in a history classroom Thursday and Friday this week, and watched an episode from the history channel on the US role in WWII five or six times with different groups of teenagers. I noticed the intensity of the music, the anxious, amnesiac pace of cramming a decade of history into less than 45 minutes… Pearl harbor given 7 minutes out the gate, with the entire history and deployment of the atom bomb getting a fleeting 3 minutes near the end. It said the US government spent 300 billion dollars on the war, much of it funded by the new, female tax base. I asked the students if they know how much our military budget was last year. They didn’t, they’re quick though and looked it up— $816.7 billion went to the DoD last year, with another $71 billion in additional military spending. That’s more than the next nine countries combined.
None of that goes to the VA. And not that it necessarily should. I say that simply to emphasize that none of that almost $900,000,000,000.00 goes toward rehabilitation and integration of our military personnel.
Why do we memorialize certain memories in the ways we do? Why do we tell the national stories we do? This Big Dog will bite if you rattle his cage, innit TK? Where is the mourning for our soldiers and warriors in that light? I don’t pretend to know a lot about any of this. I know what I know though.
So I mourn with and honor those in and of this land older than America today, with the brothers and sisters who died in the line, and the ones who came back to find themselves placeless—there are no words grand enough to give thanks for those kinds of sacrifices. I see you and I’m with you though… remembering to practice gentleness and generosity like Deer and Turkey, because that is all I truly can control. One Love.
