The structural anguish of Memorial Day
Today is Memorial Day. For most Americans, it's the kickoff to summer. For a subset of Americans, it's a marker of the worst thing that ever happened to their family. That's a sobering dichotomy.
The unambiguously good development of fewer war deaths and fewer American combat veterans has shifted the dynamics between the two groups; in 1955, a lot more Americans had a family member or personal friend who died in combat than today. The entire cultural shadow of WWII is just obviously way less noticeable than when I was growing up in the 80s, and I presume that shadow was nothing compared to the 50s.
This makes it possible, I think, to completely avoid the meaning of Memorial Day now in way you could not in the past. It really is National BBQ day for many people. You can have a get-together with a lot of people and have no collective connection to the war dead. And leads to a fair amount of awkward cultural norms, like "Happy Memorial Day" or VP Harris' moderately-tone-deaf "Enjoy the weekend."
At one level, this is a fantastic development. But that doesn't mean something hasn't been lost. Not only for those who carry the burden of Memorial Day but for the wider public too. It irks me that my kids still earnestly ask me things like, "wait, what's the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans' Day?" Even though the structural situation makes it more or less inevitable.
I have a strange relationship to Memorial Day. My mom's aunt, Jane Patterson, died in WWII. One of the last casualties of the war, August 9, 1945. Four years later, Jane's younger sister had a baby and named her Jane. That's my mom.
The strange part is I didn't know any of this until I was an adult. My mom never talked about it. And she of course had no personal connection to Jane Patterson. Her mom (my grandmother, and Jane's younger sister) died before I was born, but also (according to my mom) never talked about her sister or her death. My grandfather, himself a WWII veteran, never talked about Jane. My great-uncle (Jane and my grandmother's younger brother), also a WWII veteran and married to a WWII widow, also never talked about Jane.
Jane's death in 1945 doesn't affect me in any personal emotional way. But the fact that I knew people who were close to Jane, and talked to some of them regularly about WWII when I was younger, but never heard a word about Jane, is deeply disconcerting to me. That, for whatever reason, they preferred to bottle up the anguish. And ever since I found out a couple of decades ago, I have thought about Memorial Day very differently. And it definitely makes me supportive of efforts to shift Memorial Day back somewhat to its original cultural meaning as a somber day of remembrance. You don't know what sort of crosses people are bearing.
From first principles and devoid of cultural or historical context, the easy solution would be to flip Memorial Day and Veterans Day. A three-day weekend in May to celebrate people who are standing there with you eating their own hot dog, and a random cold fixed date in November to focus on people who can't be there with you. That Veterans Day is for the happily living and Memorial Day the tragically dead is obvious but important.
But of course that's not going to happen, because cultural and historical context do exist. I don't think it's realistic (or particular useful) to move Memorial Day off of Monday and return it to a fixed date. I do think it worthwhile to talk to children about Memorial Day and encourage them to take it seriously. Memorial Day, like a funeral, is as much (or more) for the nurturing of the soul of the survivors as it is for the dead.