Candy flies through the air. Flags flutter from lamp-posts, bunting festoons every porch. Veterans of America’s various imperial wars wave from their cars. So do members of the Town Council as they toss handfuls of Tootsie Rolls and lollipops to the spectators. Cheerleaders twirling batons precede the marching band, whose trumpets and tubas compete with the Canadian geese honking overhead. The temperature’s climbing towards 90 degrees.
It’s a classic Memorial Day in small-town America. I suspect many folks — though not all — have turned out for the same reasons I did: summer’s beginning, barbecue’s sizzling, and someone we know is marching in the parade. Which makes incidental those “millions of men and women who died serving their country,” as Joe Davis, spokesman for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hyperbolically put it.
Needless to say, our insouciance angers guys like Joe and such groups as the VFW and the American Legion. “Both have adopted resolutions calling for the observance to be returned to May 30 … . Since Memorial Day was moved to become part of a three-day weekend about 40 years ago, the change has undermined the true spirit of the holiday, says Joe Davis…”
Intriguing that Joe never worries whether the true spirit of the holiday has undermined America. Those “millions of men and women” he urges us to remember transformed a constitutional republic into a lawless empire that cruelly subjugates people worldwide, defying not only common decency but our own ideals of liberty. Even his organization’s name — “Veterans of Foreign Wars” — confesses this sin.
Nor does murder and mayhem overseas satiate the Feds. They rob, kill and lie to us, too, the taxpayers footing their bills — then expect us to show our gratitude at times like this.
Another such “holiday” looms in a few weeks. Nor does Flag Day exhaust government’s narcissism: there are also Presidents’ Day and Veterans’ Day. (Some might add the Fourth of July to the list, but I don’t. It originally commemorated a Declaration of freedom from government. Naturally, nauseatingly vain Leviathan twisted that into adoration of itself.)
Contrast the State’s megalomania with the market’s humility, its eagerness to serve us though we seldom even notice its efforts. And yet we don’t celebrate Entrepreneurs’ Day. Nor does anyone parade for inventors and businessmen, or thank their families for their many sacrifices: the birthdays and anniversaries Dad missed, the vacations cancelled or postponed, the long evenings spent in the office or lab rather than at home. Such diligence, persistence and ingenuity bless us with everything from life’s most basic necessities to its highest luxuries, in abundance and enormous variety, with convenience that’s nigh miraculous — the diametric opposite of the death, destruction, poverty and utter misery the State inflicts. Yet Monday we honored warriors, not these benefactors of humanity.
Meanwhile, the State subtly and not-so-subtly indoctrinated us serfs at its parade. The candy winging our way came not from my cousins in their antique auto or the other private cars but from the Town Councilmen. The lesson was probably lost on the kids scrambling for LifeSavers and bubblegum in the grass edging the street, but we’ll assume their parents took note. A troop of Cub Scouts dispensed goodies, too – from a public fire-engine rolling by.
The fire-station sits catty-corner from Town Hall; though this hamlet contains just 1300 souls, those governmental buildings account for two of the establishments along Main Street’s half-dozen very short blocks.
Main Street also boasts some historical markers. Ironically, one testifies to government’s wickedness as its acolytes march past. It tells that us a nearby nineteenth-century canal often flooded the area (though it neglects to mention that the state authorized the canal in an early example of “private-public partnership”). And so, “during the summer of 2004, water inundated several homes in the village during a flooding event” — as distinct from a flood? — “for which a Presidential disaster declaration was issued. Through the efforts of Mayor ___ _ ___ in conjunction with [the state’s] Emergency Management Agency, the village was able to obtain funding through the Federal Emergency Management Agency…to acquire and demolish six flood-prone homes…The land has now been restored to a natural floodplain and deed restrictions placed on the land prohibit future development in perpetuity.” Adding insult to injury, one victim’s garage now “serve[s]” the county’s park as a “picnic shelter.”
In other words, politicians and their cronies dug a canal that flooded homes and farms for the next two centuries. And what was government’s cure for its outrageous mismanagement? Did it penalize the politicians responsible? Did it fill in the canal? Of course not, silly citizen! It stole the land, “buying” it whether the owners agreed to sell or not, and destroyed the evidence of its irresponsibility.
So cocksure is the State, so shameless in its criminality, that it brags about its malfeasance. And why not? I was the only one reading as the celebration of government’s greatest evil tooted its way down Main Street.
