— Ojibwe, Native American Song
By Blue Bronc, a Trail Mix Contributor (also, see PatD below)
This is a fine time for a holiday. It is also a holiday which occasionally, most of the time really, has lost its meaning. This is when we honor those military and other uniformed services members who have lost their lives protecting these United States. One of those, a Navy seaman, was my great-uncle.
His ship was not a fighting ship and not a large ship either. She was a converted civilian cargo ship, her keel laid in 1913, and after civilian service she was commissioned to the U.S. Navy July 26, 1918. In service for not eight weeks she was sunk by a German submarine torpedo September 16, 1918. * My great-uncle’s body was never recovered.
From the Revolutionary War on, many of my ancestors answered the call for volunteers to fight for the United States. Dying is not on the list of reasons to enlist by most. Yet is one of the reasons to not join used by so many. They may not say it out loud very often. Listen to the many excuses-reasons for not enlisting.
My grandfather loved his brother very much. So much so he enlisted as soon as he turned eighteen. But, by that time WWI had ended and his hate of Germans had to be quenched. He loved the Navy too. But he, like all others of my family, were not career military, we were enlistees who served and then returned to civilian life.
Many of my friends and co-workers are veterans. They have their stories of family and friends in the military. They too look at this weekend as a holiday. We each have ways of remembering and honoring our dead.
*His name is the second name of the enlisted dead.
More Posts by Blue Bronc
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Submitted by PatD, a Trail Mix Contributor
Presidential Proclamation
In honor of all of our fallen service members, the Congress, by a joint resolution approved May 11, 1950, as amended (36 U.S.C. 116), has requested the President issue a proclamation calling on the people of the United States to observe each Memorial Day as a day of prayer for permanent peace and designating a period on that day when the people of the United States might unite in prayer. The Congress, by Public Law 106-579, has also designated 3:00 p.m. local time on that day as a time for all Americans to observe, in their own way, the National Moment of Remembrance.
NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim Memorial Day, May 30, 2016, as a day of prayer for permanent peace, and I designate the hour beginning in each locality at 11:00 a.m. of that day as a time during which people may unite in prayer.
I also ask all Americans to observe the National Moment of Remembrance beginning at 3:00 p.m. local time on Memorial Day. I request the Governors of the United States and its Territories, and the appropriate officials of all units of government, to direct that the flag be flown at half-staff until noon on this Memorial Day on all buildings, grounds, and naval vessels throughout the United States and in all areas under its jurisdiction and control. I also request the people of the United States to display the flag at half-staff from their homes for the customary forenoon period.
Army Rangers Release Memorial Day Song From Afghanistan
https://youtu.be/HZvUAD0wGOc
More Posts by PatD
MAY 29 2016, 12:30 PM ET
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Decoration Day. That’s what my maternal Grandmother called this day all her life. She had uncles & a step-grandfather who served in the Civil War. We decorated the graves with red geraniums.
The Marie Antoinette Socialism of Bernie Sanders’s Wife
Fun reading of the “Don’t Do As I Do. Do as I say” variety.
sjwny – I grew up with Decoration Day too. Today I also include my ancestors and family in Finland even though they have a different day in Finland to honor those killed, the third Sunday in May. My great-grandmother died because of the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. Many of my great- uncles and great-aunts fought the Soviets. One great-uncle recently died, with the shrapnel still in his body.
solar, this is off the subject but tho’t that with your insatiable curiosity and joie de vivre you’d be interested in it from this week’s new yorker: “Metamorphosis What is it like to be an animal?”
it reviews 2 books, “GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human” (Princeton Architectural Press) by Thomas Thwaites and “Being a Beast” (Metropolitan) by Charles Foster.
sample quote: “He thought it must be wonderful to live in Noggin’s eternal present—to smell the grass, the wind, and the water without worrying about the future, the past, the meaning of life, or the inevitability of death. How much simpler to be an animal!”
Memorial Day post: The Big Red One
Jamie – Most likely he knew my father-in-law. Same duty (radar) and locations. After Italy he was sent to Monaco to invade France from the south while the Normandy invasion was going on in the north. He ended up in Germany and then occupation. The draftees were returned to the States while regular Army like him were waiting to go to Japan to fight. For him, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were important, no one wanted to invade Japan.
We should have left it at decoration day and the meaning would have been clear but due to the ongoing conflict between the north and the south that was not possible. Decoration Day afterall was really a confederate holiday
In their 2014 book The Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday, Dr. Richard Gardiner and Daniel Bellware concluded that credit for the origins of Memorial Day should likely rest with a group women in Columbus, Georgia known as the Ladies Memorial Association, who beginning in 1866 held an annual observance originally called “Memorial Day,” then subsequently referred to as “Confederate Memorial Day” after (as referenced above) northerners co-opted the event in 1868 and established their own Memorial Day.
Thanks, Blue & Pat.
This day is always difficult. I’ll see you tomorrow.
Somone should ask the Strumpetta what he thinks about the confederate flag
W. H. Auden is probably my single favorite poet after a certain guy from Stratford. He wrote a series of sonnets “In Time of War” all of which featured some aspect of the terror and lost. You can read a few more of them here. In the poem below, he later changed the word simple to “harmless” to reflect the monuments that tell you nothing about the reasons those who are buried beneath them are there.
Here War Is Simple by W H Auden
Here war is Simple like a monument:
A telephone is talking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan
For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.
But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.
I posted the next paragraph on yesterday’s stream. Dumb old-guy.
“Well, time to go outside and raise the 48-star flag from half- to full-staff. The flag is the burial flag I rescued off Ebay”
Hit
By Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
OUT of the sparkling sea
I drew my tingling body clear, and lay
On a low ledge the livelong summer day,
Basking, and watching lazily
White sails in Falmouth Bay.
My body seemed to burn
Salt in the sun that drenched it through and through,
Till every particle glowed clean and new
And slowly seemed to turn
To lucent amber in a world of blue …
I felt a sudden wrench—
A trickle of warm blood—
And found that I was sprawling in the mud
Among the dead men in the trench.
.
from harrison daily voice:
Hillary Clinton Breaks From Campaign For Hometown Memorial Day Parade
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. — While Americans are familiar with scores of headlines that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy has generated this spring, the former secretary of state met with folks who know her in a very different way: as a neighbor and community member.
Clinton, who has lived in the Chappaqua hamlet of the town of New Castle since 1999, took time off to march in the local Memorial Day parade, which she has done for years. She was joined by her husband, former President Bill Clinton; Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who lives in the northern side of New Castle; as well as State Assemblyman David Buchwald and members of the local town board.
Away from the stump speeches and headlines, coming home afforded Clinton a chance to be at ease and away from the relative pressures of the trail. Clinton, who lined up for the parade at Ridgewood Terrace, made small talk with fellow residents.
[….]
A large press scrum on hand to cover Clinton was met with the candidate’s large entourage of campaign workers and Secret Service agents. As members of the press tried to get take images, members of Clinton’s side tried to keep them from getting too close, which was a constant tension throughout the parade.
The parade went down the King Street hill before proceeding along South Greeley Avenue, which is right in the middle of downtown Chappaqua. The parade subsequently concluded at the war memorial plaza in front of the Chappaqua train station, where the annual Memorial Day service was held. The Clintons attended the service before departing.
XR sending sympathy for you for a day that is painful
Even in victory, Donald Trump can’t stop airing his grievances
Jenna Johnson
Decoration Day goes way back, probably to the first colonist and their first grave yards. It started as a communal day where the whole community came together to clean up the graveyard. It is placed after the summer crops would be planted and before the wheat harvest. It was a day to honor and remember the dead, often passing stories and family history on to a new generation.
By the time I was a child the communal work was gone and everybody paid into a maintenance fund. But it was still a place where families gathered and traded old stories and I got to meet distant cousins. I listened to the stories being passed around . It was my time spent listening to the stories that gave me m a personal connection to history and kindled my love of it to this day
Except for the occasional war dead and the flags on the veterans graves there was little in common with modern memorial day. In my world as a child the difference between the two was easy. Decoration day had a personal connection where as Memorial day was a fderal holiday of importance only to those who got the day off.
Jack
It’s not only Latinos: Donald Trump is also driving Asian Americans toward the Democratic Party
Daniel Donner
Ah, Tony, how many demographic groups do you think deadbeat don can drive into the Big Tent by election day ?
Thanks, Ms Cracker. You’re a dear.
The Atomic Cake Controversy of 1946
http://conelrad.blogspot.com/2010/09/atomic-cake-controversy-of-1946.html?m=1
Goodnight, Champ.
usatoday:
Animal rights activists made it past the barricades and attempted to rush the stage before being stopped by security at a Bernie Sanders rally in Oakland, Calif. on Monday.
Howard Dean: Sanders Needs To Stop Giving Supporters “False Hope” That He Can “Undo The Rules” Of The DNC
Tim Haines
NEW THREAD