Come on this is the US, we have no morals everything and anything can be manipulated for profit especially when it’s a National Holiday. Well except 9/11, but once it becomes an official National Holiday watch out for those Car and Soda ads – PB/TK
How Memorial Day Went From Somber Occasion to Summer Celebration – By Merrill Fabry / May 25 2017
For as long as Memorial Day in the United States has been the widely acknowledged unofficial start of the summer season, Americans have been complaining that the holiday isn’t celebrated the way it’s supposed to be to be. When TIME commented in 1972 that the holiday had become “a three- day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose,” the magazine was already comparatively late to bemoaning Memorial Day’s party reputation. That’s not surprising considering that the day began as a way to remember the staggering 620,000 people who were killed during the Civil War, and is now best known as a time for going to the beach or do some shopping.
What’s perhaps more surprising is that this tug-of-war between solemn remembrance and summertime fun is almost as old as the holiday itself.
The original vision for the day, as expressed by Union General John A. Logan, the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a powerful national veterans association of Union soldiers, emphasized honor and dignity. “Let us, then, at the time appointed, gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with choicest flowers of springtime; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us as sacred charges upon the Nation’s gratitude, the soldier’s and sailor’s widow and orphan,” he wrote in his order to organize such a day. In 1868, some 5,000 people responded to his call by visiting the then-new Arlington National Cemetery on the appointed day, to hear future President James Garfield deliver an address on the “immortal” virtue of the war dead and the decorate the graves of the soldiers buried there with flags and flowers.
Already the occasion was one for mixed emotions: somberly remembering the dead, but also celebrating the cause they gave their lives to further.
As Yale historian David Blight writes in his book Race and Reunion, early speeches for Decoration Day — the name originally given to the holiday and used alongside “Memorial Day” until the mid 20th Century — often celebrated the Union soldiers’ fight to end slavery and to preserve the union. (Confederate Memorial Day, which is still celebrated in a few places, was something different.) Blight quotes a handwritten missive from a newspaper correspondent who described an 1865 ceremony held by former slaves in Charleston, S.C., at which the attendees’ signs of emotion are specifically described as “tears of joy.”
But, while the New York Times in 1869 mentioned how crucial it would be to “keep ever in mind the original purpose” of the day, not much more than a decade after the end of the war some were already seeing that the “joy” side of Memorial Day was beginning to outweigh the remembrance. “The old pathos and solemnity of the act have vanished, too, except in very quiet country places,” the New York Tribune wrote after Decoration Day 1875. The Tribune continued its laments in 1878: “It would be idle to deny that as individual sorrow for the fallen fades away the day gradually loses its best significance. The holiday aspect remains; how much longer the political character of the observance will linger we dare not guess.”
Continue to time.com article: http://time.com/4770697/memorial-day/?xid=homepage
