Banner of Blood: Reflections on Memorial Day

Banner of Blood:

Reflections on Memorial Day

No mistaking it, it’s a genuine Midwest-American celebration: Memorial Day. A morning parade filled with everything red, white, and blue kicks off the day, while posters with slogans like “freedom isn’t free” and “support our troops” plaster front yards and car windows. The discount plastic patriotic merchandise, flags, paper plates, plastic cups, garden kitsch, are only a dollar and the print on the back reminds us “made in china” Families pack into their SUVs and head to the park with coolers filled with over processed, over packaged, and over hydrogenated foods, anxious to get back to their television sets. Meanwhile, US troops are abroad, and we are blindly supporting their continual violations of human rights, their actions to protect private corporate interests, and their tactics to keep the countries opposed to capitalism intimidated and living in fear. This whole idea of remembering our fallen is a but difficult for me to conceive when the schools hardly seem to acknowledge the immeasurable number of death at the hands of US trained troops and the results of foreign policies.

This lifestyle and these ideas of patriotism, development, and the notion of the US as a world power and promoter of freedom and democracy, are nothing I am capable of being proud of. To be clear, I am not proud to be an American, and no amount of plastic flags lining the entrance of the super market will make me feel any different. I feel like we all missed that essential class called independent thought 101. And I am angry that anyone who questions theses ideals or people who think outside of the dominant discourses, have be persecuted in a witch-hunt they call democracy. This discourse’s chief enforcer is the constant bombardment of ideas about what it means to be American, to be a consumer, to be a man or to be a woman, the list is endless.

Is this freedom? If we do not have intellectual freedom and the spaces for alternative discourses to develop and cultivate naturally in communities, how can we say that the US is a free country? In conclusion, “freedom isn’t free,” but banners of blood are on sale, this Monday only, a 99 cent special.