Memorial Day

Do you really know why we started having this holiday?
I mean, do you really know?

"It's a day to honor the military, right?"

You're halfway to being correct.  It's a day to honor the military dead; a day to remember those who paid the ultimate sacrifice.  It's not technically a day to honor veterans (That's Veterans day on November 11.), although it is a lot easier to thank them for what they did than thanking the dead because they can actually hear you.  So, I'm not saying you're terrible and wrong for thanking our veterans.  It's just a friendly reminder because, ironically, we sometimes forget what Memorial Day is really about.

Memorial Day's origins date back to the Civil War.  Some say it is inspired by Southern women who would go and decorate the graves.  Eventually this practice spread to the North, and the first formal Decoration Day, as it was originally called, took place on May 30, 1868.  Eventually, this got changed to being the last Monday of May so we can have three day weekends.

Because that's what's important right?  Having days off and barbecuing and going to parades and whatever else it is Americans do to celebrate the holiday.  I mean, that's what this is for, right?

Allow me to cite you some statistics:
Number of fatalities in the Civil War:  Approximately 620,000

• 2% of the population died in the conflict
• The combined total of fatalities in all other American wars did not exceed this total until the Vietnam War.
• In today's numbers, imagine if over the last four years, America had lost six million men and women in war.
• One in four Civil War soldiers did not return home; approximately three and a half million men (and a few disguised women) fought in the Civil War
• In today's numbers, that would mean we would have sent approximately thirty-four million servicemen and women out.
• The  US military only has approximately one and a half million active duty personnel.
• Two thirds died from disease.
• That's approximately 413,333 dead from disease; only 206,667 from battle.
• Our today numbers would then translate to four million dead from disease and a "mere" two million dead from battle.
• These statistics are only the fatalities, not the casualties (which includes those killed, wounded, and captured/missing), whose numbers were not matched in all other wars combined until our current War on Terror.

Do you understand the price that was paid alone in the war that inspired this holiday?  I'm not even citing you the statistics from the Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Mexican War, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Persian Gulf War, the War on Terror, and any other conflicts (i.e., the Quasi War with France, the Indian wars) that Americans have been involved with.

Maybe America is not the country she started out as.  Maybe we romanticize the way things were in the past.  But the fact still remains that the freedoms we have have been preserved because of the sacrifice millions of men and women have made.  This sacrifice has not just been made by those who enlisted and paid the ultimate price of their lives--their families and friends also felt the pain of that sacrifice.  Although I can't think of anyone I personally know who has died in war, I have had lifelong friends who have been deployed, and I have prayed for their safety because I know how devastated I would be if anything happened to them.  But I'm lucky.  Not everyone my age has been so lucky.  The current war has roots in an attack that took place on my country when I was eleven.  How many other twenty-two year old women, both nowadays and throughout history, have had to hear the terrible news that their brother, their sister, their husband, their father, their boyfriend is now dead?

I have been interested in history since I was seven, and my first fascination was with World War II.  Now my main fascination is the Civil War.  Not a generation of Americans has not felt the horrors of war to some extent.  We have either romanticized or demonized it.  But at the end of the day, no matter how good a cause was fought for, no matter who won or lost, no matter how the war was perceived by the public, every war has required its participants to sacrifice.

And the ultimate sacrifice is what we honor on this Memorial Day.

Sources

The Civil War. Dir. Ken Burns. PBS. 1990. DVD-ROM. 
"Civil War Casualties." Civil War Trust. N.p., 2013. Web. 26 May 2013.
"Memorial Day History." Memorial Day. N.p., 4 Apr. 2009. Web. 26 May 2013. 

Life At the Nerd Tables, Part 2: "If You Read the Books..."

"Gandalf is going to send Jack Sparrow on a dragon through the wardrobe to Tatooine in Warp 5 to kill the Cullen brothers with a Quidditch ball."

The above quote summarizes a little bit too well what went on with this particular group of nerds.  I'll refer to this group as "Nerd General"--a few drama people, a few music people, maybe one or two techies (but put more than two and that completely changes everything), and an overarching group of people who have far too much knowledge about a particular school subject/popular franchise.

For example, I know a lot about Pirates of the Caribbean.  I can tell you how old Captain Jack Sparrow was when he became captain of the Black Pearl.  I can tell you what he did as a teenager.  I can even tell you what he did in those two years before he was viciously mutinied upon.

Similarly, I had friends who had read so much Star Wars Extended Universe, you can't even theorize Star Wars VII's plot line in their presence because this will happen:

You were doing fine there until you said "daughter"

Anyway, the first line of this post is basically the end of the conversation that sparked my Mixed-Up Fantasy World Facebook Note Serial (click the link to read, but please don't read if you can't stand fantasy/crossovers/magic/fan fiction/people who hadn't read Harry Potter when they wrote it or if you like Twilight).  Incidentally, I should probably give ginormous credit for that work to my friend Cutler who inspired it, thought it was awesome, and said he saved it to his computer when he quit Facebook for a while.

Kind of like any five minute conversation when you eat with a bunch of people who are part of "Nerd General."

Yeah, that's oddly probably one of the things they should warn you before you eat with us.  You will lose the game.  Regularly.  I don't know, maybe this happens with jocks too.

"What is the game?" some ignorant to the phenomenon may ask.
It's a game everyone in the world is playing.  Some are just not aware yet. Your only goal is to not think of "the game."  As soon as you have thought of "the game," you have lost the game.  Now that you are aware, you are required to play.  Have a nice life!

Okay, the other thing is, there is probably an expert on some topic within your general facility.

Have a history question?
We got a few of those people.  And we'll give you a hundred extra details besides for free.
Have a Star Wars question?
Over there, those people are.  Wielding lightsabers, they are.


Want to know any details about what the Silmarillion is  and what is contained within its
pages?
The Lord of the Rings fans are over in that direction, huddled over their rings, muttering, "My precious." (Some of them aren't even at the nerd tables.)

Theology question?
Hello, this is a Bible college.  Let's all get together and thoroughly discuss this based on what each of us has learned under our sundry pastors and teachers and own private study.  No guarantee we'll end up with an answer, but we'll be more in awe of God than when we started.

And this could easily go on at any nerd table.

And if you haven't read/watched what we're about to discuss, prepare to be in a world of confusion.  I mean, at the table I discussed in Part 1, I was almost never confused, except when people cryptically talked about conversations that I hadn't been around.

Here, I get confused when the Star Wars people start discussing Extended Universe or, until I read Silmarillion, anything that didn't happen within the pages of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings.  Seriously, you ask a Star Wars person a simple question like, "Who is the father of Anakin Skywalker?"  Next thing you know, you're treated to a ten minute dissertation about how midichlorians work and how they possibly could have gotten inside Shmi Skywalker, and just when you think they're about done--BAM!--Darth Bane somehow gets dragged into it because he is apparently, cool.

I know, like, nothing about this guy, but apparently, some people know a lot.

Or, for my own personal example, you ask a simple question, like, "When did Memorial Day start?"
"Memorial Day started with the Civil War when Southern women went to decorate the graves of their soldiers.  This eventually also caught on in the North.  It was originally known as Decoration Day, but over time, we came to call it Memorial Day."
"Why is it the last Monday of May?"
"Hold on; let me Google that...Some general declared it.  And actually Memorial Day is May 30.  The Monday thing is 'Memorial Day (Observed).'"

All that knowledge crammed in my head, and I still struggle finding my way to the closest restaurant that sells shawarma without typing the address into my GPS.

You have no idea how badly I want to be at that table.

So, basically, I mean, it's really hard to explain this group of people to anyone outside of us.  It's just kind of like a random conglomeration of people who all happen to be nerdy about something.  More than likely, we all were nerdy about different stuff, but the fact that society had for some reason classified us as nerds was enough for us to sit at the same table, pull up a chair (And another.  And another.  And another.), and eat a meal together, laughing hysterically and occasionally plunging deep into the depths of theology before rising back into laughter because someone said something totally hilarious that did relate/was supposed to relate to the conversation, but now we're laughing, and the topic has completely changed.

But, like I said, maybe the jocks are like that too.
I wouldn't know, though, because I've never really been one.
And I don't need to be to be cool.
Because being a nerd is way too much fun.  And, you know, considering we have the people that ultimately control the technology the jocks and the regular people use, we will one day rule the world!

"What are we going to do tonight, Brain?"  "The same thing we do every night, Pinky.  Try to take over the world through methods that can't be mentioned on the Internet lest Katrina fall under suspicion if any of them happen."