Remembering All The Dead In Shadows And Light

THE WANTS OF BUSINESSMEN being what rules in this, our vaunted liberal democracy,  the sacred act of remembering the dead was bound to be reduced to a meaningless Monday holiday, a long weekend, the unofficial start of summer three weeks before summer actually starts.   It would be better if they'd kept it as it was,  a day that could come on any of the days of the week, a fixed holiday despite the inconvenience to the engines of making the rich richer,  those who wanted to spend it drinking in front of screens or anything other than remembering all of the dead.  

Making it into yet one more occasion of nationalism, concentrating only on those who died in wars was less bad but it still diminished the day as I remember it still being, a day when you were to remember all of those who died.   If those who make the decisions such as for Monday holidays instead of real ones can be depended on doing, it's even making the solemn occasion for reflection that should be the only reason to memorialize those who died in wars to cheapen it into a tawdry opportunity for exactly what the dead don't have any use for, nationalism and political posturing and blathering.   

Silence would be better than a parade or concert or speech.  A day of silence, maybe some of it at the sides of graves, graves for those who died in war, many of those civilians, graves for those who never were in wars, those who opposed wars, those who just lived their lives out in their communities or in many communities, in their families.   It should be a day of shadows in light, the shadow of death, the light of the hope of heaven and the way to get there.   

My Memorial Day morning started by a really disturbing elaborate nightmare of hell as being an enormous, up-scale department store I got trapped in while being dragged along to shop for Christmas and couldn't get out of.   Not until I asked for help and remembered that I could force myself to wake up from it.    The longer I think about it the more appropriate I think it was as a warning to me - what I was being warned against, I'm not ready to say.   Several of my dead and about to die relatives were in the dream, what that means I can only guess at and I'm not ready to do that.  I can say that was the shadow for me, today.   I'm going to spend some time at the cemetery but I'll do that tomorrow.  Too many People there today.  Maybe I'll wait till the 30th to do that.  I'm not big on the Monday holiday thing, except for Labor Day.