Blog
Memorial Day Losing Some Luster
Another Memorial Day is over and truth to tell, I’m a little miffed.
If you are one of the regular 21 or 22 (what can I say, stats show my readership is booming!) who read these scribbles, you are probably old enough to recall your younger years when parents and grandparents headed to the cemetery. We planted flags and honored our dead.
I heard stories about relatives I never met who served in World War II or Korea and didn’t make it home. I heard men who I thought were tough as nails get choked up in their memories. I listened as some talked ever so briefly about their own time in the service.
How much does that happen today? To be fair, maybe a lot. Maybe I’m missing it. But it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like Memorial Day, 4th of July picnics, family reunions in the park, honoring heroes and remembering those who came before have lost their luster; have gone the way of the kitchen wall phone and Jiffy Pop stovetop popcorn.
If that’s true, what a shame.
No, I’m not pining for the return of the corded phone or Jiffy Pop. Heck, I either burned the popcorn or burned my hand on that metal handle. It just seems like we are losing some traditions that had importance attached to them.
We live in a world of convenience, of instant gratification. There is no doubt I do not have the fortitude to do what my great-grandparents did. They left their home country and came to a foreign land. They worked the soil with bare hands. When I and others look back and say our forefathers carved out homes and futures with those bare, calloused, bleeding hands, that friends is not hyperbole. That is fact.
Tougher than me? No doubt. Tougher than today’s younger folks? Not even debatable.
How does it turn around? Does it? You got me. But if it has a chance, I think it starts with those traditions . . . like honoring (and mourning) our military who gave everything they had, including their lives.
Two cents, which is about how much Timmons said his columns are worth, appears periodically on Wednesdays in The Paper. Timmons is the publisher of The Paper and can be contacted at ttimmons@thepaper24-7.com.