Marking Memorial Day

Most holidays come and go and I lament that I don't do more to mark the day. National holidays are often little more than a day that I don't go to school or work. Yesterday, Memorial Day 2008 was shaping up to be more of the same, though I did at least openly lament my likely lack of engagement pre-holiday instead of just during or after. While the thinking about the day is something, yesterday I did a little more and am now not beating myself up as much as I usually do.

Yesterday at around 6:30pm, I went for a run. I ran north on Front Street and at about Pine Street I turned right into a small public park. While I had been there before, I forgot that this park is the Philadelphia Vietnam War Memorial. So while I wasn't looking for a way to acknowledge the day, I was given a nice opportunity. I jogged in place and kept listening to my ipod mix and read every name on the memorial - it took about ten minutes. And then I kept on running and on the way back I stopped briefly at the nearby Korean War Memorial.

Next American holiday to celebrate in a way bigger than fireworks, day off and drinking is Independence Day. Two years ago I was taking a cultural diversity class in my masters of social work program at Bryn Mawr and recall writing a journal entry which included an excerpt of famous speech by Frederick Douglas on the hypocrisy of Independence in America. See below for the excerpt:

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States at this very hour.