Saturday, May 9, 2015

Musings on difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day

I realized I was a bit confused about Memorial Day (May 25 this year)  and Veterans Day (November 11) so I searched the internet.  The difference is that Memorial Day honors those who died in defense of our country and it became a federal holiday in 1971. Veterans Day honors living veterans of all wars.
 Memorial Day was “ originally called Decoration Day and was initiated to  honor the soldiers for the Union and Confederate armies who died during the American Civil War in  the 1860s. The holiday, per www.publicholidays.us/memorial , was meant to unify the celebration as a national day of remembrance instead of a holiday celebrated separately by the Union and Confederate states.”  Confederate flags are always planted on the graves of Confederate soldiers in Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day.
 In spite of the attempt at a unified memorial day, some southern states also still hold their own Confederate memorial day (Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, South Carolina, North Carolina) though it is not always a holiday closing offices or schools in every state. The dates are not uniform nor are the names of the celebrations. Texas for example calls it Confederate Heroes Day and is held on Martin Luther King’s birthday Jan. 19.
 Veterans Day names and celebrations differ from country to country. Originally called Armistice Day, it is to celebrate on the day the combatants signed the end World War I. Most countries (except France and Belgium) the holiday name.  The United Kingdom and Canada in 1931 adopted the name  Remembrance Day, while the United States chose All Veterans Day (later shortened to 'Veterans Day')  in 1938 and later extended it to  honor military veterans of all conflicts. When I was a child in Oklahoma in the 1950s we still referred to it as Armistice Day. I remember wearing a crepe paper poppy on that day to remind us of the end of World War I and those that died in it.
 I have often found myself on British Commonwealth territory in November. Artificial poppies, red with a distinctive black middle, are worn in remembrance of the fallen in the poppy covered Flanders Fields in Belgium inspired by a poem by John McCrae. Poppies are sold as fund raisers to provide charity to veterans of all wars. I always bought a poppy to remind me that our close allies in the British Commonwealth suffered even more than us in World War I.

In remembering my relatives and ancestors who fought on our behalf, I do have a special prayer. It contains thanks for their service but I also pray that the leaders who will send them to battle in the future have the wisdom to avoid putting them in harms way in vain and first seek other options to settle conflicts. War should only be a defensive action against an attack on us and our allies. To launch wars as a pre-emptive strike should never be in our country’s traditions.


http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/confederate-memorial-day

A version of this appeared in the Sky Hi Daily News Friday May 22, 2015

A fellow Rotarian asked if I had ever heard this version of Waltzing Matilda which became a war protest song in the 70's.  I thought I had heard most of the folk songs of that era, but this one I had not, or if I did, I forgot it.  On Poppy Day, as I called veteran's day, and also celebrated it in UK territories, I thought this was a reminder of the horrors of war, not only horrible to those who died, but the horrors of  the wounded waarriors who returned home.  Thank goodness we no longer practice trench warfare, and modern medicine saves so many who otherwise would have been corpses, the return of them home is equally devastating, new prothesis technology not withstanding, and especially those with PTSD. The last paragraph of the column above reflects my views on warfare.

Thanks to Tom Woodruff for bring this to my attention in the following email and for the link to the adaptation of Waltzing Matilda:

"Here is the collection of links concerning a touching song—"And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda"-- that I spoke of at Rotary last Thursday.  Sometimes this song almost brings me to tears. 

"Waltzing Matilda” is the unofficial Australian national anthem, a romantic story about a vagabond who ended up haunting a pond.  A vagabond’s sack on a pole held over his shoulder and waltzing it means swinging it as one walked. 

The song describes war as futile and gruesome, and criticizes those who seek to glorify it. This is an account of a young Australian soldier—formerly a vagabond—who was maimed at the Battle of Gallipoli during the First World WarThis was written during the time of the useless Viet Nam war which took out about 60,000 of my generation, and may have been meant as a protest against that obscenity. 

The first link is to a description of the campaign that is the setting of the song.  The second is to an article about the song itself.  The third is to an excellent rendition of the song by its author, Eric Bogle.

As you probably know, there is no need to read all the way through these Wikipedia articles.  You generally get the story in the first couple of paragraphs and the rest is endless detail....."






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