Memories 4 Sale, Flag Hags, Conversations With My Mother, And The Bicycle Conundrum

So it’s Memorial Day.
Years ago they, back when RAM was more precious than gold, there used to be a lot of companies that would advertise in the back of computer magazines with the proclamation “We’ll buy your old memory!”
I would look at those ads and say, “Great, what’ll you give me for the last eight years?”
Along a similar vein, the other day I realized that my life so far has largely been a sequence of events that, upon reflection, simply cause me to shake my head and sigh.
So.
Memorial Day.
Ah well, it’s not meant to be a memorial to your own life, so let’s hear it for all of our Veterans and departed loved ones and move on to some other topic.
Of course, said topic does involve Veterans, or at least a Veteran, namely my ex-father-in-law, whom my mother informed me recently wrote in a letter to the editor of the local paper back home.
Evidently in running a profile on some prominent local citizen the paper ran a picture of her in front of an American flag.
He wrote in to object because the manner in which the photo and text were laid out led to her  name being set atop the picture of the flag.
Bear in mind that this was merely how it was printed in the paper; the woman’s name was not printed on the actual flag.
Still, he saw this as cause to launch off onto a diatribe about this and other “desecrations” of the flag that, from my mother’s description, sounded like the kind of sheer nonsense that always made my eyes glaze over whenever he’d spout it around me, and reminded me that one of the benefits of the dissolution of my marriage was that I never had to spend time with him or any of those people again.
Beyond rolling my eyes at his craziness, though, I was struck, as I often am when the topic of “desecrating” the flag comes up, by the silliness of it all.
After all, the idea that a flag can be desecrated implies that it is, in some fashion, sacred, and in a nation which so many citizens are quick to claim is a “Christian” nation, that sounds an awful lot like idolatry.
Of course, as much as those citizens try to get the Ten Commandments put up in government buildings, they don’t really work quite so hard at actually following them, so I suppose they don’t see the problem with worshipping a graven image, or at least elevating a piece of fabric to the level of sacred.
Now there are those who would argue that it’s not so much the piece of fabric that they’re concerned with as the ideals that the piece of fabric represents.
Okay, but guess what?  Rip the fabric (or print someone’s name on it) and the ideals are still there.
As symbols of ideals go, flags really aren’t that great anyway.  I mean, sure, they can be visually striking and serve as an easy to identify rallying point (much like a corporate logo), but they have a tendency to fade, get dirty, and, as has been demonstrated many times, they burn pretty easily.
Besides, every country has a flag.  Every single one.  Even the countries that are total shitholes have flags.
Ultimately our flag is just another piece of fabric amid hundreds, with nothing to make it stand out.
So as a symbol of America and American ideals, the flag is really sort of lackluster, to be perfectly honest.  Oh sure, it’s easily identifiable and it’s got a good color scheme, but what does it really say about America?  That there are 50 states?  That there were originally 13 colonies?  How does that really represent America’s ideals?
The fact of the matter is that we have a much better symbol, one that actually should be considered sacred, one that actually does represent American ideals, and one that actually does stand out:  the Constitution.
More specifically, the Bill of Rights.
Hell, even Nigeria has a flag, but does it have a guarantee of essential human rights and freedoms?  I think not.
And yet, so few people really appreciate this rare and special symbol of who and what we are as a nation, and so many would happily allow the rights it guarantees to be trampled over as they spend their time worrying about how a picture of a piece of fabric is being reproduced, and as I exalt this document most people’s eyes will glaze over just as surely as mine do when they exalt the flag.
After all, it’s that pesky litany of rights that keeps letting people get away with desecrating the flag.
*Sigh*
Anyway, to bring my little rant to a close, I’ll mention that as I was out walking today (there were like a million people, all on bikes, out on the trails) I saw a site that can best be described as bitterly ironic, considering what was on my mind as I was walking.
It was a rusted out old pick up driving along, an American flag, stapled to a thin strip of scrap wood, which was wedged into one of the holes on the box of the truck, flapping in the breeze as the truck drove past.
With a mirthless smile I gave the flag a quick salute and kept on walking…
Anyway, now that I’ve finished demonstrating my lack of patriotism by talking about how I believe in the actual ideals of the country rather than the piece of fabric that’s supposed to represent those ideals, I’ll move on to more standard fare.
While I was talking to my mother she mentioned that she and my dad have been invited to go somewhere that they don’t want to go.  Trying to put a positive spin on it, she said, “Well, maybe it’ll be all right and we’ll have a good time.  You know how sometimes you’re dreading going somewhere but then you end up having a really nice time?”
“No,” I said, flatly.
My mother sighed, and said, “Well, of course you don’t, but normal people have that happen sometimes.”
Later, we discussed the possible upcoming schedule change, and I mentioned that Scott would be pleased to have Sunday off, as it would allow him to go to church with Stacy and the kids.
“You should go to church,” she said.
“For what?”
“You can go and pretend to believe.  It would give you something to do.  Maybe you’d meet someone.”“I don’t want to meet someone who goes to church.”
The conversation pretty much disintegrated from there into the standard fare about thinking positive and so forth, though later, when she was expressing a continued lack of interest in going to the dinner they were invited to, I was able to sarcastically turn her own words against her as I encouraged her to think positive.
Over the weekend I made up a meal plan for the week in order to help me plan out my grocery shopping.  I used to do it, but got out of the habit.
In any case, even thought I had a meal planned for today, and needed to go grocery shopping if I was going to eat anything other than what I have in the freezer (which I don’t like to do, as those are my lunches for work), I decided to not go out into the world.
After all, it’s a holiday, so it was bound to be even more full of people than usual.
Ultimately, though, I decided that I would go shopping, though I was going to just get what I needed for today.
Once I was ready to go out, though, I decided that I’d be better off just getting all of my shopping over with, and so I did.
I had lunch when I got home, and then, as mentioned, went for a walk, as it’s a beautiful, sunny day.
As I mentioned, the trails were filled to overflowing with people on bikes.
I’ve been toying with the notion of buying myself a bike, if for no other reason than that I’m tired of being the only person on the trails actually walking.
There would be a lot of hassles associated with having a bike, though, not the least of which is storage.
Still, it would be better exercise than just walking, and I’m sick of having those smug, spandex-wearing bastards whizzing past me as I slowly plod along, so the idea keeps kicking around in my head.
So I don’t know.
Tomorrow I’ll be going to see X-Men 3:  The Last Stand with Scott and Stacy, and that’s pretty much the extent of my plans for the week (beyond my meal plans anyway)
In any case, I hope all of you are having a fine, suitably patriotic Memorial Day.