Rusty Strait | Senior Reporter
Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Remembrance Sunday, Armed Forces Day – everybody hoops it up a week or two before it happens and then poof – the flags come down, the flowers soon fade on the graves and take a ride to the trash bin. All the candy, meals, gifts and grave flowers are nothing more than gifts to corporate greed. We love our holidays, but Memorial Day should not be a day to go out and have a good time – get drunk, overdose or buy significant gifts for others or donate a few dollars to a tax-deductible non-profit corporation (all of which is deductible on their income taxes).
You’re not supposed to honor our warriors, deceased, MIA or brought home without arms and legs or eyes that once smiled into yours. You should mourn their loss and apologize for those who didn’t return. Men and women who volunteered (or were maybe even drafted) to put their lives on the line so that we could continue our living it up, eating high on the hog and imbibing expensive alcoholic beverages, while they often were eating out of a can call C-rations, and drinking stale water out of a canteen as they huddled down in trenches; took their lives into the sky where the fourth of July fireworks were called anti-aircraft missiles. Or maybe they were on an aircraft carrier or battleship dodging torpedoes from enemy submarines or rockets.
The troops at home understood this because they were known as the “support troops.”
I find it absolutely disgusting that a nation goes through the motions on one day of acting or feeling sorry but soon forget what it was all about unless you were one of those families that lost a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a grandparent or a favorite cousin. You are the ones that show grief because you don’t just see it as some guy that got in the way of a bullet meant for somebody else.
War and loss is not a video game with rat-a-tat and how many more did I kill than you at the Arcade. As General Sherman stated on the March to Atlanta during the Civil War, “War is Hell.”
If you want to see real patriotism and mourning loss, visit the many veterans’ organizations at any of their meetings: American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, Wounded War Heroes, etc. They’ve been there. They know from experience that it isn’t just a celebration one day and hoot-de-hoot the day after.
May God always be with the Gold Star Families, whoever their God is, and may he or she bless them with comfort and understanding because Corporate Greed World will only milk the memory with costly embossed plaques from which they bleed money to fill their overrun tills.
There’s more, but if you don’t get my drift I’m wasting my time. Just sayin’
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