Memorial Day Here This Year

This year, as every year this time, the local newspaper ran, at the top of its front page with an accompanying article, a photo of veterans of WW2, Korea, and other affrays, formerly older than me but now increasingly in my age range and even younger, and looking all spiffy in berets and white shirts while placing red, white, and blue flowers around the stone dedicated to the county war dead and set -- appropriately I would agree -- on the football field of the high school. But I was taken aback when, under that customary Memorial Day shot, was an only slightly smaller photo of a man dressed in a gray Civil War Confederate uniform and proudly adjusting his huge red Confederate flag. And on an inside page there was another pair of such matching pictures, with the man in gray flanked this time by a pair of gleeful-looking ladies dressed in the dark garb of that blessedly long gone plantation era.

Right away I saw how well it has been that, though I am a veteran of four years in the U.S. Air Force, with an honorable discharge and several letters of commendation for my service therein, I have never had the slightest interest in taking part in those observances, though I would never fault those who do--

Till now.

I had the impression that this year's Confederate participation was new in that annual event. Though it practically had to be dragged into the Secession, Virginia became in many ways the heart of the Confederacy, and it hosted far more than its share of the Civil War battles. But there was already a modest statue of a Confederate soldier in a somewhat statelier spot, on the lawn of the county courthouse, and I had thought that ought to be plenty enough for that.

So I read the accompanying article with special interest, and it turned out that this was the first time that the Civil War re-enactors had taken part in the Memorial Day ceremony.

In the event that they weren't talking about just that particular group of nostalgics, I wonder what happened there. The article quoted them as saying that Memorial Day started with the Civil War. So had they been trying all along to have a role in the occasion? If they had, why had they been unsuccessful till now? Or was this the first time that they thought to try? Is this the first time they've had enough people to take part? Was it a hard struggle for them to be included, of the type about which even an "inspirational" movie could be made, with a sort of civil rights touch?

I suppose I could ask around about these things, but I won't. There has been only one guy around here that I would feel comfortable in asking. A well-regarded native of the county, he took part (I believe) in those observances when they were purely the doings of groups like the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars, as I suppose they still are. But Stanley left here for the Great Beyond several years ago. And anyway, the way things seem to go, I will find out willy-nilly anyway, now that I've brought it up, even if only in my mind and on this weblog, which won't be read anytime soon by anyone within a thousand miles of here.

Meanwhile I have to wonder how any descendant of the slaves brought over from Africa, as I am, could ever be expected to take part in an observance that in part honors those who fell while fighting tooth and nail for the right to keep those fellow American citizens locked in slavery?

Was that question, too, ever discussed, in the unknown deliberations that led to that unsettling picture on the local front page?