A Quote by Howard Zinn
Memorial Day will be celebrated ... by the usual betrayal of the dead, by the hypocritical patriotism of the politicians and contractors preparing for more wars, more graves to receive more flowers on future Memorial Days. The memory of the dead deserves a different dedication. To peace, to defiance of governments.
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Memorial Day should be a day for putting flowers on graves and planting trees. Also, for destroying the weapons of death that endanger us more than they protect us, that waste our resources and threaten our children and grandchildren.
Ceremonies are important. But our gratitude has to be more than visits to the troops, and once-a-year Memorial Day ceremonies. We honor the dead best by treating the living well.
Are they dead that yet speak louder than we can speak, and a more universal language? Are they dead that yet act? Are they dead that yet move upon society and inspire the people with nobler motives and more heroic patriotism?
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
We should not take a Memorial Day recess until we pass a proper memorial for the slain students in Littleton, Colorado, and other school gun tragedies.
Psychoanalysis has taught that the dead – a dead parent, for example – can be more alive for us, more powerful, more scary, than the living. It is the question of ghosts.
Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because the regret is stronger than gratitude.
There are good points about all... wars. People forget self. The virtues of magnanimity, courage, patriotism, etc., are called into life. People are more generous, more sympathetic, better, than when engaged in the more selfish pursuits of peace.
Matt looked up kids from his high school class. Only three were listed as dead, but a bunch were listed as missing/presumed dead. As a test, he looked us up, but none of our names were on any of the lists. And that's how we know we're alive this Memorial Day.
I am humbled, gratified and overjoyed at the dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in commemoration of my father's leadership. It of course means a lot to our family. But more important, it is a great step forward for America.
I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.
I was never young. Whoever I was then is dead. That's more of your quills. I don't want a hide full, thanks. I have always figured that you die each day and and each day is a is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you have died a couple thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand.
Nowadays, many Americans have forgotten the meaning and traditions of Memorial Day. At cemeteries across the country, the graves of the fallen are sadly ignored, and worse, neglected.
Sinners in their natural state lie dead, lifeless, and moveless; they can no more believe in Christ, nor repent, than a dead man can speak or walk: but, in virtue of the promise, the Spirit of life from Christ Jesus, at the time appointed, enters into the dead soul, and quickens it; so that it is no more morally dead, but alive, having new spiritual powers put into it, that were lost by Adam's fall.
Visiting the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., for example, I was struck by its marginalization of any other victims apart from the Jews, to the extent that it presented photographs of dead bodies in camps such as Buchenwald or Dauchau as dead Jewish bodies, when in fact relatively few Jewish prisoners were held there.
In the United States alone, we spend seven times as much on war as on education. There's something wrong there. On this Memorial Day, we should certainly honor those who have died at war, but we should dedicate this day, not so much to their memory, but to the search for a way to end the idiocy of the wars that killed them.
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