Today, all across America people will wake up, raise their flags to half-staff, pray for and remember those who have sacrificed time, bodies, and lives from the earliest battles of the American Revolution for the very freedom that allows us to raise our flags, then return to them at noon and raise those flags fully as we look forward to continued freedom throughout our county.

That’s the ideal for Memorial Day.  The unfortunate reality is that this holiday as with all the others has become a reason for a day off from work, to complain about not getting a day off from work, another weeklong sale for every retailer from car dealerships to drug stores, and to raise gasoline prices.  Are we being cynical?  Maybe a little.  But…

You only have to have been watching television for the past two weeks.  At least a quarter of the ads have featured Memorial Day Sales.  Special deals, special financing, special purchases, special hours.  It’s all happening this day only but because the savings are so big they’re making this one day sale stretch over most of May and half of June.

Yet while all this was going on, where were the Memorial Day stories?  Finally on Friday the national news outlets squeezed in a feature to close the newscast spotlighting a returning serviceman or how flags are made.   The local news might have picked up two stories spotlighting a returning serviceman and a part of a highway dedicated to a World War II fighting unit.

Today will start with the local news repeating those couple of stories they’ve been playing all weekend long.  But then there will be parades and at the end someone will play Taps.  There will be an honor roll read, cemeteries will get visitors, churches will hold memorial services.  And some will have not forgotten and raise their flags to freedom.

You see, what society has forgotten, people will remember.

Now, that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you?