SPEAK UP: Memorial Day open thread

What do we remember (and forget) as we look forward to the summer and beyond?

Another Memorial Day weekend is here, and many of us are looking forward to a little break, students and parents are looking forward to the end of the school term, and, of course, everyone’s excited about the traditional beginning of the summer season.

It’s also a good time to reflect on how we tend to forget (or bury) political meanings. In the U.S. Decoration Day, the precursor to the current holiday, has its beginnings in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the public effort to bury the Union dead, unknown and known. The idea took hold nationally by 1868, and later that was extended to cover remembrances of the wars that followed — too many of them, certainly — becoming an official national holiday in 1971.

As historian David Blight (whose work resurfaced the holiday’s origins) puts it in his account of the origins of Decoration Day:

Some stories endure, some disappear, some are rediscovered in dusty archives, the pages of old newspapers, and in oral history. All such stories as the First Decoration Day are but prelude to future reckonings. All memory is prelude.

The celebrants of that first observance in 1865, as Blight tells the story, were the Black citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, where the war began.

It’s worth thinking about neighbors coming together to remember the past, clean up and decorate the markers of countless unknown soldiers, children marching to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and the notion that there’s always a chance for a new beginning following tumultuous, polarized times like our own.

So what does this holiday mean to you? What memories does it hold? What are you reflecting on this weekend? If you’re seeing family and friends (or attending reunions, graduations, or any of the other friendly and fraught events that mark the occasion), what are you talking about with them? Let your fellow readers know, and feel free to bounce those ideas around here.

These open forums are for our subscribers, and, as such, we expect people to be generous and open, to listen and to share. This is not for anyone with an internet connection. This is your space.

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Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images)