From Sales to Salute: Thinking of Memorial Day Celebrations

shlomi on May 26, 2025

A day that in Israel was solemn, accompanied by sirens, tears, overwhelming media coverage, and the faces and names that every family in Israel connects. And while there are those who fell in “administrative” work (aka, car crashes when not on a mission, passed from disease), the large majority of them are young men, and now women, who gave their lives in the defense of their country. Everyone stops on the roads and highways for the sirens, every student has a focus on the day, and people are interviewed on the lives and sacrifice of their fathers, siblings, daughters and sons and other loved ones. It’s immersive, it’s a bonding (or at least binding) event.

That the definition of “defense” under the reign of PM Netanyahu and a cabal of fascists, if not racists, is the same that drove the 1973 or 1967 wars is a separate, if more tragic, issue for lives wasted for no value on both sides.

In America, except for a minute fraction of Americans, it’s a day off, a day for special sales, for a change to get out and rev up the first big barbeque or crawfish boil party. Wal-Mart, Best Buy, even the religiously respectful HEB (shout-out to an amazing grocery chain). Home Depot, Hobby Lobby, and others are open for the eager, vacationing public. A few sites handwave the salute to the troops that died, making a handy shopping day for them.

What would it be like if America, as a country, treated Memorial Day more as an active, national day of reflection? Where Americans could come together despite their political, social, or racial differences? While the optimistic me imagines the conversations and connections that could be forged in group settings, the cynic imagines clumps of fractured groups, each trading their daily anger for each other for a safer one for those safely dead.

Things to consider.

May His Name be Blessed

shlomi on June 19, 2008

I generally regard ‘News Fleas’ as being replaceable and generally irrelevant, but Tim Russert’s untimely death has thrown a wrench into my asinine assumption.

Each generation has its cadre of honest, blunt, frank and otherwise weatherbeaten tellers of truth. Tim was one of them, and, especially in this charged election year, he will be missed. Perhaps more than in decades past, where the differences between candidates were accented, rather than blurred, Mr. Russert was a speaker to power, and an honest reflection of the vaunted and villified ‘man on the street.’ He asked the questions we would never be able to phrase, given candidate management systems and infrastrutures build specifically to keep their lauded ‘chosen one’ from having to respond to the direct spear thrust of the honest question.

Tim spoke truth to power, and, like the Jewish “Ethics of the Fathers,” was the one who asked the blatant questions where others feared to go. We need more like him, even more now that he is gone.

Baruch Dayan Emet. And may God help us see the truth from the lies this fall.