This Memorial Day

First business.  Here is a link to an old post I did about movies we try to watch on Memorial Day.  The same can go for other similar holidays, like Veteran's Day and Independence Day.  

Now, fact is, times change.  The older boys are all going on their respective paths in life and aren't around like they used to be.  That means  we can't just plug in movie after movie.  Chances are, if we see one, it will be that one for the holiday.  

Nonetheless, the older three still try to make space to be with us.  Even when dating girls, they say they need at least one night a week to be with the family, if not a couple.  If nothing else warmed my heart in this cold age - and it is cold, we need the heat on during this weekend owing to Global Warming - it would be that. 

There is also the changing times in general.  I wrote here that we are wrapping up 'Their Year'." That is the part of the year in which month after month is dedicated to framing the US, the West, white people, and Christian values as Nazi evil.  Oh, there are islands in that oceanic storm of anti-Westernism: Lent and Easter, Presidents' Day, St. Patrick's Day, Memorial Day - but the whole of this half of the year is met with endless pokes and prods against almost everything the boys were raised to cherish. 

Though they pointed out something.  This year they heard less of the news pieces or clips or asides celebrating Black History Month or Martin Luther King or the sacredness of feminism, or the usual accompanying reminders of slavery, racism, sexism, genocide, bigotry, and general evil that usually swirled around such things in years past.  They wondered why.  Then the concluded that there is no longer a need. 

Let's face it, the forces that would destroy the West, its values, its beliefs and faith, its principles, its freedoms, benefits and ideas of equality before God, are now entrenched and beginning to officially move forward.  There was no need to continue anti-Nazi propaganda after the war was over.  There is no need to continue turning people against America and the West.  It's happening on its own.  However many object or wish it wouldn't, the war for the West is over, and it is lost.  As I said before, we're now in mop-up operations. 

Because of this, and because of what they see and hear in their college environment, it's tough to feel that same sense of rousing patriotism and awe for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.  More like pity they said.  Pity that the country they laid down their lives for was unable to survive a few dozen generations.  Pity that many who died gave their all for a country their children and grandchildren gleefully set about destroying and handing over to its new enemies.  

Like one son said, however, America rose from nowhere to dominate the world in a mere hundred years or so. It would stand to reason, therefore, that our demise would be a speedy affair.  Perhaps that's the point of anything in this world.  All things fear time, but time fears the pyramids, so goes an old Arabic proverb.  Unless you're the pyramids, time will gobble up anything we do, no matter how virtuous, how brave, how honorable.  Sometimes those actions will be remembered for ages to come.  Sometimes they fizzle fast.  In any event, if we do it to be remembered forever by men, we do it in vane.  

Perhaps it's enough that we do it, and the One who sees all things will know what was done, even if everyone else in the world forgets, or works to undo it. I suppose, at the end of the day, that's still worth celebrating, that those facing the inevitability of time still gave everything they had for us chaff in the wind.