By Felicia Knight
We all know what this coming weekend is, right? It’s the unofficial start of summer, of course. (The Knight Canney Group is a Maine public relations firm, so around these parts, we know it as the unofficial start of the summer tourist season.) That’s how the innkeepers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, and gift shop owners know it too. The petroleum industry, the airlines, Amtrak, and Greyhound know it as the start of the summer travel season.
Memorial Day weekend is second only to Thanksgiving weekend as an economic harbinger of seasonal retail madness.
How did Memorial Day go so far off message? Let’s face it. We’re Americans. We have no compunction whatsoever about turning a profit in the face of solemnity. (Commemorative 9/11 coins anyone?)
The exact origins of Memorial Day are vague, but we do know that our national practice of remembering our war dead on May 30th began following the Civil War in 1868 with an order from General John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic. Originally known as “Decoration Day,” the order called for “decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country.”
The United States has been engaged in nine full-fledged wars since the Civil War, in which men and women have died. And that doesn’t include engagements in Grenada, Somalia, or the bombing of a marine barracks in Lebanon or the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. It’s not as if we have no war dead to remember or that Memorial Day has outlived its usefulness.
Everyone who buys a car, a new camper or even, yes, a mattress, this weekend, isn’t automatically an unpatriotic oaf. And it’s hard not to feel celebratory when watching a Memorial Day parade, so what is the appropriate message for Memorial Day?
How about: Enjoy yourself, but give some thought and deep thanks to those who helped make all our long weekends possible.