I feel as if a lot of the "civic" holidays are observed less now. Perhaps part of it is that a lot of people have moved away from where their recent ancestors lived, perhaps some of that chain has been broken.
Perhaps that it's because we've lost the WWI and nearly all of the WWII vets, and the Vietnam Era vets were from an era of an unpopular war, and so there's always that reckoning of "what we did over there*" and also "people here were protesting it, sometimes in somewhat ugly ways" and perhaps the same with the Gulf wars.
(*All war is bad, we whitewashed it a lot in the past. But atrocities always happen, civilians are always killed, and the real question is, is the evil we are working to stop greater than the evil we are inflicting?)
When I was growing up, though, I think people paid less attention to the idea that celebrating war is (as we say now) "problematic" and also we did have enough veterans left from the "big" wars. When I was a child in the mid-1970s, men who fought at 18 in WWI would have been in their 70s, and a few were still in good enough health to march in the Memorial Day parade, and WWII vets were in their 50s or even 40s.
And yes, I remember the 1976 Memorial Day parade. Perhaps my town did a big thing for it because we were pretty small back then, we had a strong sense of our history ("Connecticut's Western Reserve") and also, there was a pretty active American Legion and VFW. I was a Brownie Scout - I know I've written about this before. And we marched alongside the veterans
And I took it very seriously. I had the white gloves that what we were taught about flag etiquette said were required for carrying a flag in a parade
And here I am. Foreground, left of center, wearing the jumper dress uniform and strappy brown shoes with white ankle socks:
It made a big impression on me. Like I said, I took it very seriously. (I took a lot of things seriously as a child). But I knew it was an Honor, and on some level I was representing my country and was there for the veterans.
I don't know if it was that in some ways the 1970s were a more optimistic time (the Bicentennial) or if it was just that I was a child then, but it did feel to me like we were getting better as a people and nation, and that great things were ahead. (Oh, for some of that optimism now)
We never did the go-to-the-cemetery thing, but some families did. I don't know that there were any war dead buried in my town (or at least, not recent burials; I'm pretty sure there were men who had fought in the Civil War buried in the old cemetery). And my town was reasonably proud of its abolitionist history; they always talked up about how John Brown grew up there (he was actually born in Connecticut) and that we were a stop along the Underground Railroad (allegedly, some of the old, old houses in town had hiding places where escaped slaves had hid)
(Now that I think about the attitudes in my town....well, I wonder if people are still so "proud" of that given the political leanings of some. Sadly.)
I didn't have anyone in recent memory of my family who died in a war or even who fought - my Uncle Stanley, whom I never really knew (he died when I was about 3) had been in the Navy in the Pacific in WWII, but he was one of the ones who came home. And I had a great-uncle who was in the trenches in France in WWI,, but again, he came home. And my paternal grandfather very nearly missed being sent "over there" by virtue of his train pulling into NYC* on either November 11 or 12, 1918, and him hearing the sounds of a giant party, and gradually finding out that the war was over. Given that he was an experimental pilot, and was going to be flying missions on a fairly primitive plane - well, I shudder to think, I might not even be here, not in this form. Granddad saw a plane with a buddy of his flying crash while he was training (the buddy was killed) and my understanding was it affected him greatly, possibly even contributing to the bouts of "melancholy" he had the rest of his life.
(*The story seems a little TOO pat but I am choosing to believe it, it could have happened).
I wonder though, if we haven't lost something in no longer telling the family stories, and not doing some of the old traditions (when my mom was a kid, Memorial Day was when you went to the cemetery and not just visited the veterans' graves, you cleaned up and put new flowers on the graves of your family members, veterans or not). Now, all of my family who are buried are buried far from me, I'll never see their graves in person, likely (I saw my maternal grandfather's, once)
But I also admit that, Because of Reasons, I don't have a lot of zeal for celebrating "patriotic" holidays right now...
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