Memorial Day .. not .. Veterans Day

On the last Monday in May now, Americans celebrate and remember their fallen countrymen and women.  Appropriately, it is the day first proclaimed by President Lincoln during the American Civil War, after the Battle of Bull Run (a Union defeat and retreat); and the day perhaps most like  his values and philosophy as an American.

All Americans are veterans, and some are veterans of short term or long term service in the nation’s public safety or armed forces.  Today however, is a special day for remembering and honoring those who died in their active lifetimes while serving their country in its defense at war or kindred life risking service in armed conflict during peacetime at home, often abroad.  In Lincoln’s time, with his New England Puritan heritage, and general religious beliefs, and closeness to northern hemisphere calendar customs, Spring and its best time, became the chosen time of honoring our dead.  So while it may be a day of remembering those fallen for our survival as a people and a nation, and too, the good survival of others, it also joins many to a traditional spring recollection of their friends and families no longer living.

A happy time, the weather and spring vitality about us, we remember in good times those whose very human duty, saved us in some way, and those whose nurturing of our beginning lives created us.

With all our dignity and anticipation of a climate’s good summer times, we need do little more than recall them, for a minute as we would, and celebrate good free lives for them, and, with their constant and still contributing sprit.