A Chronicle of Life and Death on the Happy Planet
(...and you don't look so good yourself!)
"I hold your doctrine of 'memento mori'.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover's quarrel with the world"
Robert Frost - The Lesson for Today
I'm really a loud and cranky curmudgeon about "holidays" that celebrate militarism on our Happy Planet. I think it reinforces poisonous memes in children, who later go on to kill or be killed when governments wage war on other governments via the people who live in the land. At my age I'm not likely to have any other take on the subject. And I will never apologize for my worldview. My fury at the continuing malarky about the necessity of war grows exponentially.
For this "Memorial Day" I'm recommending some potent reading. The Robert Frost poem linked above is the first. Next you can read Mark Twain's 1901 address to the Anti-Imperialist League of New York: To the Person Sitting in Darkness; and finally try out a piece akin to the Twain address, but written this week (May 2004)about the myth of the "Good War": D(isinformation) Day: 60 Years is Enough
In the end I'd prefer "Memorial Day" to be a day when human beings living the USofA remember the waste of life, resources and time that goes into so-called "good wars", and to personally vow that no government will ever dupe them again into thinking there can EVER be such a thing as a "good war". This is my memento mori for today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
