Happy Memorial Day

Memorial Day 2021

 Memorial Day is the most contradictory holiday in These United States. We can really feel it this year because of the added pressure release from the Covid pandemic numbers decreasing due to the vaccination boost: people are emerging into the public in huge swarms & the desires to party to kickoff summer get underway.

Which isn’t a bad thing, situated in the calendar at the end of the school year and in the month of longer days leading toward the Summer Solstice, Memorial Day heralds the feelgood summer vibes that we all want.

Amidst the buzz of relaxation, I do wish there were a bit more gratefulness about the significance of Memorial Day honoring the sacrifices of those who died in service to our nation. Since I’m a pacifist, I propose an expansion into recognizing those who died for our nation who were not soldiers, especially since the origins of Memorial Day began in South Carolina in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, when Black folks freed from slavery honored the Union soldiers who perished in the awful Confederate prisoner-of-war facility in Andersonville, SC when they came together to re-bury the dead and honor their sacrifice.

The end of May also marks the anniversary of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1920, which stands as the largest & most violent acts of racist terrorism against a Black community, though there is a long list of these atrocities to consider.

I think it’s fair to meditate & honor the citizens of our nation who died for the sake of state violence, whether they were military or civilians who had their lives snuffed out by violence sanctioned by the state.

Maybe it doesn’t strike some of you that Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, and Philandro Castile should be remembered like a military veteran cut down too young in the hostilities of war, but as for me... I can no longer see the difference.

Freedom is not merely a personal state of being. Freedom takes a community effort together to safeguard the health, safety, the dreams & hopes, and the responsibility we owe to one another to insist on equality before the law and the liberty to run our lives in a loving manner, lifting all of us up!

I wish you all the joys and the solemnity of Memorial Day, 2021.

Chris DeBarr - friend, chef and a man who has a way with words

Memorial Day

The TRUE Memorial Day Meaning

Memorial Day Thanks

Memorial Day

Thoughts for a long weekend

"I regard class differences as contrary to justice"

Some varied thoughts from Einstein

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving. I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men. I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.
[…]
Schopenhauer’s saying, that “a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,” has been an inspiration to me since my youth up, and a continual consolation and unfailing well-spring of patience in the face of the hardships of life, my own and others’. This feeling mercifully mitigates the sense of responsibility which so easily becomes paralysing, and it prevents us from taking ourselves and other people too seriously; it conduces to a view of life in which humour, above all, has its due place.
[…]
The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty. The ordinary objects of human endeavour—property, outward success, luxury—have always seemed to me contemptible.

Memorial Day

Not Free

Nothing is ever free,
though to you it be.
Somewhere, somehow,
someone paid.


©2002 Roger W Hancock (www.PoetPatriot.com)

Memorial Day Thanks

On this Memorial Day weekend, I would like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all of the Veterans who have given their lives so that we can live in utter freedom in America. There are those that would argue with me, but I don't care about them.



I certainly hope there are citizens of other countries that wish our war dead a huge thanks for giving ~them~ freedom.

Thanks to all Veterans - both alive and dead - from a grateful citizen of this country, divided as it seems. In my eyes we are still the UNITED states of America.