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05-26-2002, 12:00 AM
Remembering lost loved ones on Memorial Day (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1424822)
By DAN RATHER
Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the spring of 1866, the newly re-United States was a nation eager to return to normalcy. Only a year before, on May 26, Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had given up the trans-Mississippi army, bringing the Civil War to its final end, a month after formal surrender. After a war in which the casualties on both sides were American, well over half a million soldiers had been buried in the graveyards of the North and the South. Abraham Lincoln had also been a casualty of war, the first American president felled by an assassin.
It was in this first season of renewal after war's end that Americans began laying flowers on the headstones of the Civil War dead. A tradition was born, originally called Decoration Day. Two years later, the first Memorial Day was officially proclaimed by Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
This current generation of Americans has been fortunate to know Memorial Day mostly as the unofficial start to summer. A three-day weekend of barbecues, parades and Little League doubleheaders.
But this season finds us again searching for normalcy, and again hoping for renewal in spring's embrace. We are at war. We have new dead to mourn and remember. We remember the 37 American men and one woman who have died in America's new war.
Tradition tells us that Memorial Day is set aside for remembering soldiers. So it is, and so it should be. But we know too well that the first shot in the War on Terrorism was directed at civilians. It falls on us to remember and honor them this year, too: 3,056 souls in all, lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We remember. In the poet's words, "Yours has the suffering been, the memory shall be ours."
...
Click here to read more (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1424822)
By DAN RATHER
Your silent tents of green
We deck with fragrant flowers;
Yours has the suffering been,
The memory shall be ours.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In the spring of 1866, the newly re-United States was a nation eager to return to normalcy. Only a year before, on May 26, Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith had given up the trans-Mississippi army, bringing the Civil War to its final end, a month after formal surrender. After a war in which the casualties on both sides were American, well over half a million soldiers had been buried in the graveyards of the North and the South. Abraham Lincoln had also been a casualty of war, the first American president felled by an assassin.
It was in this first season of renewal after war's end that Americans began laying flowers on the headstones of the Civil War dead. A tradition was born, originally called Decoration Day. Two years later, the first Memorial Day was officially proclaimed by Gen. John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic.
This current generation of Americans has been fortunate to know Memorial Day mostly as the unofficial start to summer. A three-day weekend of barbecues, parades and Little League doubleheaders.
But this season finds us again searching for normalcy, and again hoping for renewal in spring's embrace. We are at war. We have new dead to mourn and remember. We remember the 37 American men and one woman who have died in America's new war.
Tradition tells us that Memorial Day is set aside for remembering soldiers. So it is, and so it should be. But we know too well that the first shot in the War on Terrorism was directed at civilians. It falls on us to remember and honor them this year, too: 3,056 souls in all, lost in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We remember. In the poet's words, "Yours has the suffering been, the memory shall be ours."
...
Click here to read more (http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/1424822)