Memorial Day

Memorial Day - A day set aside to remember those who died in military service to this country. 

This practice began in 1861, in Georgia, women remembering Confederate soldier who had died in the Civil War.  During the Civil war, union soldiers held captive, who died, were buried in mass, unmarked graves.  Following the war these sites were built up, landscaped, decorated, songs sung in commemoration, and flowers left, mostly by missionaries, women, teachers, school children, and recently freed black men. The Civil War was this country's second revolutionary war.  The first Revolutionary War was also a war fought, lives lost, for freedom.  Freedom from unfair taxation from the then sovereign nation of Britain.  Freedom was fought for and many "paid the ultimate sacrifice" so that All in this country could live their lives, taxes collected and gone towards supporting the whole, not to a King in a foreign land.  Freedom was fought so that All of the United States of America’s People could live in peace, All entitled to the basic human freedoms of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, this was regardless of race, gender, creed, socioeconomic status, or any other classification.

What is freedom?

Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines freedom as "the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action... liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another".

Freedom isn't, never has been, free.  This morning, I am exercising my rights as a free woman, in what has been a great, progressive, human quality of life based nation, to ponder Freedom and Lives lost now remembered.

I am left wondering whose freedom is being fought for now.  What, exactly, are so many of this country’s young men and women marching off to lose their lives for?  Certainly not freedom to have taxes collected and gone towards the common good.  Most of the taxes collected go towards funding military efforts all over the globe, freeing who, for what?  Tax money has gone to bailing out mega-banks, legislation passed further siphoning tax dollars to those who already have most of them, one could say, we The People, have enabled a new era of being slaves to a King.  We the People do not fight wars and lose our young adults to upholding the Freedoms of the many, we lose our young adults to enslaving the many, to upholding the King of us All, the Dollar.

We lose young men and women in a blaze of fire.  What crime warrants the penalty of this death (were it your child, whatever their age, for any possible action they could have committed, would this be acceptable to you, to have them shot down in a volley of police bullets)?  The color of a person’s skin, being black, is now, as it has always been in this country, a great dis-equalizer.  Despite so many lives lost in pursuit of equality, of freedom for all, we still live in a nation ruled by the very, very few.  We live in a nation where many are attempting to put religion and personal beliefs before the freedoms and equality of all.  We live in a nation ruled by violence, where race does determine a citizen of this country’s safety, his or her freedom.  We live in a country where ones socioeconomic class, determines ones freedom, where the masses are ruled by a very few (whether or not many choose to acknowledge or accept this as reality or not).

What will it take for WE THE PEOPLE to hold this once great nation’s Third Revolution?  For the “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave” to be brave enough to rise up and claim true freedom for All?