Memorial Day - Just Another Monday Off?

It's kind of strange to experience Memorial Day here in the USA after living in Israel for many years.

Memorial Day in Israel is serious stuff. Places of entertainment are closed. Torches are lit by relatives of the fallen. At 11 a.m. a siren sounds. All traffic halts. Drivers get out of their cars in the middle of the highway and stand silent for 2 full minutes. If you're in a meeting, the same instantaneous suspension of activity, the same silent homage to the fallen. At sundown of that day, Independence Day begins. Fireworks, barbequeues (mangal ), performances. But the organic connection is made manifest - between the precious gift of independence and the price paid by tens of thousands to achieve and maintain that gift.

Here in the USA, by contrast, there is an emotional remove -- for all but the families and friends of the recently fallen. The average American goes to the beach or to a picnic or backyard barbequeue. Maybe they attend a parade of aging veterans. But there is no national involvement, no sense of the greater collective. To take Memorial Day seriously in the USA, you have to be military family or rabid right-winger.

I see this partly as a result of our basic sense of security - something Israel still yearns to achieve - and partly as the unfortunate consequence of the wars we have fought in our lifetime, wars which lacked a national consensus. That absence of consensus has shorn military service of much of its sacred character. It is not the soldiers' fault - they cling to the sacred task of defending their nation. It is the fault of our elected leaders who are entirely too ready to send other people's children into harm's way, while their own sons and daughters would never dream of signing up to serve.