Not the kind of holiday where you wish someone a "happy."

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

I don't have a Memorial Day post in me today. 

I really don't. It's one of those "holidays" that I particularly dislike, for one thing: It commemorates horrors rooted in colonialism of one form or another, a commemoration that gets tossed aside in favor of the pursuit of capitalism. [Note: I am not in any way demonstrating a lack of respect for those who died honestly for their country; I am pushing back against the constant human regressiveness that creates the wars that must be fed by their deaths — and against the notion that such cannon fodder is somehow similarly-suitable fodder for retail exploitation.]

For another, I've really grown disgusted with two persistent aspects of it —aspects that occur to almost no one. And so for today, I'm outsourcing those two topics to two people who I regard as family, and who can do better justice to them than I:

1) The real roots of Memorial Day.

2) The fallen warriors that every Memorial Day forgets.

And, no, the photo has nothing to do with Memorial Day for anyone except me. Through some strange confluence of childhood influences, the day's associations are inextricably intertwined with thoughts of World War I, leading to thoughts of Joyce Kilmer, leading, of course, to thoughts of Trees.