Memorial Day, RIP

well, another memorial day has come and gone. nobody i know did anything to commemorate it, including me. i wanted to--but, in my hometown of gainesville, fla, nobody really cares about the military--except to express how they are the poor, stupid, uneducated stooges of our imperial elite. if i so much as open my mouth and voice an opinion to the contrary, it's like dropping a ham sandwich in front of a muslim.

what a shame.

biking through my neighborhood, which is in the "historical" duckpond area of gainesville, i didn't see a single american flag. i DID see PLENTY of "war is not the answer" signs, proudly stuck into the ground in front of well-manicured lawns. around here, the main historical significance of, say, adolf hitler, is to provide a metaphorical equivalent to the latest republican bogeyman, or in the case of the picture above, nazi = (dead) american servicemen (not to confuse the issue--these graves were desecrated in washington state, not gainesville--story linked above in post title).

as we get further away from WW2 and that generation slips away from us, we're more and more going to be left with only veterans of "unpopular" wars--Vietnam, and our "war(s) for oil". will there be ANYONE left to honor them? the past few generations of our society have been educated in large part by instructors who are under the influence of the cancerous ideology of noam chomsky and his "New Left" ilk. we see how traitors like jane fonda can actively participate in our enemy's propaganda campaign, then come home and win Oscars. we watch as at least 1/2 of the american population claims to "support the troops", but this "support" is essentially an effort to undermine them and make them suffer an ignoble defeat--just to stick it in the eye of the great hegemon...these people never EVER stop to think--to APPRECIATE--how important the sacrifices of our soldiers have been to their ability to speak freely and criticize this country. it was the sacrifices of thousands which freed us from the grip of the British Empire. and it is the sacrifices of many more today which are made to ensure that we do what we can to spread this freedom to the rest of the world, thereby helping to preserve what we have here. we don't always agree with the policies, but we should always remember that the troops don't choose the fights, and we should respect them and honor their memory.

even though both of my grandfathers served in WW2 (one of them actually worked on the manhattan project, to be precise...), i can never remember doing anything special on memorial day...oh, i take that back...maybe we went to the beach or had a cookout or something. hopefully Memorial Day won't become devoid of meaning, going the way of Christmas and Thanksgiving, but i fear it will. and i fear that america won't care, because it'll probably still be a three-day weekend.