THE CONTESTED MEANING OF MEMORIAL DAY.

Strictly speaking, Armed Forces Day is for honoring people who are wearing the uniform, Veterans Day for honoring people who wore the uniform, and Memorial Day for people who did not get the chance to remove the uniform.  I've called attention previously to the way these public holidays get conflated.

Memorial Day began, after the Civil War, as Decoration Day, which was May 30, no matter which day of the week that fell upon, and it became a tradition for people to decorate the graves of their ancestors as well as the Civil War dead.  Memorial Day was codified ... Washington standardization again, as the final Monday of May, and thus the beginning-of-summer long weekend that trips up politician and entertainer alike took its current form.  In November, what we currently understand as Veterans Day (it's an adjective, not a possessive) emerged out of Armistice Day, and it retains its November 11 date honoring the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when the War to End All Wars ended.  In the British Commonwealth, that day is currently Remembrance Day, there being an encore to that War to End All Wars, and there's more of the tribute to the dead in that nomenclature, thus their Remembrance Day has more of a Memorial Day atmosphere to it.

An observer, though, might, upon observing the same sort of joint task force providing the honor guard, the bugler, the three volleys both in May and in November, perceive a similar purpose to either day, and wonder, why have both?  It's also difficult to distinguish "war dead" from "veteran" in identifying who to memorialize, what with people returning to civilian life after being exposed to nuclear weapon tests, or Agent Orange, or the smoke from those weapons dumps set afire in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the nightmares that recur no matter how pleasant the home life or the day job might be.  Thus more than a little advocacy for veterans' benefits might find its way into the Memorial Day speechifying.

In this century, firefighters and police have found themselves on the front line of the global jihad, as well as possibly becoming involved in the not-so-cold civil war that colors our politics; and the DeKalb municipal observation both involves and recognizes the city's first responders.

In my mind, I'm hearing Sgt. Karlson grousing about that detail being out of step.

The contested meaning of Memorial Day is also on Tom "Tilting at Windmills" Knighton's mind.  He opens in that "strictly speaking" frame of mind.

I’m a veteran. I usually spend a lot of my time on a day like this reminding folks not to thank us because, frankly, we don’t want it. We want the attention on those who never came home. It’s not about us and putting that attention on us feels dirty, wrong, because those men and women deserve it all.

Rather than recognize that the speechifying tends to focus on ensuring that the veteran, and his widow, and his orphan, be properly cared for by a grateful Nation, he offers his own version of "what are we fighting for?"

This year, things are a little different.

This year, I’m spending at least some of the time thinking about how those men and women would feel about what our government has done in recent years. Allowing those who commit wrong to go free because they’re connected. Government officials trying to dismantle a presidency from within thanks to lies. A media that perpetuated those lies and then remained silent when they were brought to light.

Is this what they died for?

Finally, I came upon the simple fact that no, they didn’t die for that. They didn’t die for any government official or even the man in the Oval Office. No one enlisted in World War II for the opportunity to serve FDR. No one enlisted for Korea because of Truman, nor for Vietnam because of JFK or LBJ.

They didn’t continue to serve, to fight, and to die because of a president.

They enlisted to serve their nation. They fought not for the government, but for their friends and their families.

He's writing from a right-populist perspective, one, though that would not be out of place among pacifists of the left.

They died for what they considered right and wrong, which most definitely is not their government.

I don’t always do a good job differentiating between the nation and its government. In truth, most of us don’t. We might make that distinction in our own country, but we don’t blink in describing, say, the Chinese government simply as China. We call Putin’s regime “Russia.” We do this all the time.

But there is a difference, and these men and women didn’t die for their governments. They died for their nation.

That's the country we live in: a local pacifist organization used to march in the DeKalb parade, first unofficially and then as the final element, calling attention to Illinois's war dead in those nation-building wars.  The first playing of Taps at a military funeral was the interment of Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.