The following is a share of an essay I wrote for the Grove City (Ohio) Arts Council's Newsletter and Blog, a most appropriate article for this Memorial Day holiday week:
In my homespun
family, the term ‘Memorial Day’ never quite caught on. The name assigned to it
originally was ‘Decoration Day’, and is, to us and many others, the title most
appropriate. Since its inception on the heels of the Civil War, this
remembrance of our military personnel who lost their lives serving our country has
been recognized and practiced broadly, although informally. This is because it
wasn’t until 1971 that it was finally designated as an official national
holiday to be observed on the last Sunday in May under the moniker of ‘Memorial
Day’. World War II Medal of Honor recipient and U.S. Senator of Hawaii Daniel Inouye
worked for many of his 49 years career in the senate to restore the original
May 30th date of the holiday. It was his contention that the official
date obscures the sacred meaning of the holiday, competing as it does with the
unofficial first weekend of summer when pent-up children and adults alike storm
the unlocked gates of closed-for-the-season swimming pools and other open-air
recreations in lieu of spending the day at cemeteries.
By virtue of its nature, probably the major repository of
a country’s heroes is its military, heroes in one way or another in its largest
sense. A hero is defined as a person who can solve a problem or problems other
people cannot solve. This left-brain, bare-bones, and pragmatic one-liner seems
patently rationalistic to me, barren the full-bodied status a hero has earned
and deserves. It has been suggested that an emotional and/or spiritual need for
heroes is inborn in human beings. These necessary beings to whom we look up not
only solve the seemingly unsolvable for us, but also provide us with
inspiration to keep on keeping on during trying times, to demolish barriers in
our journey to greater heights, and to overcome our antipathy toward others. In
these ways, heroes satisfy a basic requirement found in the nature of human
beings.
When I look upon the gravestone of a military veteran,
rather than perceiving it as a marker of something lifeless, I see within it a
hero embodied as an embryo of peace. How can anyone walk among the more than
400,000 headstones of our military veterans at Arlington National Cemetery and
fail to hear Heaven’s call for Peace on Earth and Goodwill Toward all of
Humankind? Oh yes, to me each one of those pristine rectangles of white stone enshrines
an embryo of peace.
https://grovecityartscouncil.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/embryos-of-peace/
Award-winning artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior
designer Linda Lee Greene is on social media at the following:
Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com
Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor
Also look for her on LinkedIn and Google+
Her books are available on Amazon and other booksellers.
