SPEAK UP: Remember this

Thoughts on Memorial Day in troubled times, and an open thread

What does it mean to reflect on the past, especially on this Memorial Day?

It’s worth thinking about in a year when Donald Trump has suggested not just renaming Veterans Day but is planning a full-blown dictatorial style military parade for his birthday (and, incidentally, Flag Day).

Scholars of authoritarianism suggest that it’s important to keep track of what’s changed — norms, laws, expectations. You may be familiar with the idea as the impetus behind projects like the activist Amy Siskind’s The Weekly List, an inventory of such changes going back to the beginning of Trump 1.0.

The subtly shifting ground of political memory isn’t a unique feature of authoritarianism — it’s always been a feature of American life, however much it might have accelerated under the Trump regime. Some of the meaning of Memorial Day has disappeared into its own memory hole, and not just in terms of most of us thinking of it as the beginning of the summer season, or a day off with a few good sales. Decoration Day, the precursor to the current holiday, began as a public effort to bury the dead in aftermath of the Civil War. The idea caught on nationally by 1868, was later extended to cover remembrances of the wars that followed, and became an official national holiday only in 1971.

The celebrants of the first Decoration Day in 1865, as historian David Blight has written, were the Black citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, coming together to remember the past and clean up and decorate the markers of countless unknown soldiers, accompanied by children marching to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” and motivated by the notion that there’s always a chance for a new beginning following tumultuous, polarized times like our own.

That is all to say, as things change more and more, it pays not to lose sight of the liberatory and truly patriotic meanings of these days off we take for granted.

So in the comments below, let us know your perspective on what’s changed — and even how you’ve changed. What are you reflecting on this weekend? What are you talking about with family and friends you’re seeing for reunions or graduations or whatever else? Let your fellow readers know, and feel free to bounce those ideas around here.

These open forums are for our supporting 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 Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images; illustration Pierce Archive LLC/Buyenlarge via Getty Images