Memorial Day among the Millionaires for Obama

by philg

Our town held a “remembrance and celebration” for Memorial Day.

The invocation was given by the local church’s assistant minister, a long-haired mid-50s (?) woman who had formerly identified as a man (the head minister is in a same-sex marriage, but as far as I know, neither he, his husband, nor their adopted children, are transgender). Her speech was a plea for more tax dollars to be spent so that unemployment and homelessness among U.S. veterans was reduced to 0% (i.e., every veteran would have a house and, if desired, a job). Conclusion: “religion” in our town is actually primarily “politics” (but with 99% of the parishoners voting for Hillary, is this not preaching to the converted?)

[Note that existing funding (more than $180 billion) for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is roughly triple the total military budget of Russia and nearly as large as the total military budget of China (Wikipedia).]

Our national anthem was sung. Everyone stood up and placed hands over hearts. I tried to get people in my row to kneel with me, but was unsuccessful.

There was a moment of silence for the 6 total U.S. combat deaths in Afghanistan in 2017 (i.e., fewer than might die in one SUV crash stateside). We also remembered the roughly 20 veteran town residents who had died since Memorial Day 2017. Quite a few had served in World War II.

Each veteran in the town was invited to come up and share a story, including of battles fought in. The Vietnam vets were laconic. A former Navy pilot said “Mostly I was a danger to myself when flying.” Everyone else talked about bureaucracy, desk jobs, and enormous sums spent on preparedness for events that never occurred.

An active-duty soldier from the Massachusetts Army National Guard delivered the keynote address. She has served for five years, lives in a suburban home, and commutes to her Transportation Company office in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Although she has never been deployed overseas, she has been decorated with five medals.

Our town’s Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts were on hand to handle various tasks. At the end I asked a Girl Scout if she wanted to join the Boy Scouts now that they were simply “Scouts” and were accepting girls. She demurred. I asked two Boy Scouts if they were enthusiastic about welcoming girls. The answer was “no” and “studies show that kids learn better in single-sex environments.” They said that they were keeping their shirts, embroidered with “Boy Scouts of America”.

Our fire and police departments grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, wrapping each one in aluminum foil to keep warm. Environmentalists in town want to spend $100 million to bulldoze the existing school, park the students in trailers for three years, and rebuild a “Net Zero” school of roughly the same size and in the same location as the current building. This will pay for itself after 454 years if the current annual utility bill of $220,000 actually does go to zero (and assuming we can borrow at 0% interest). I expected these folks to scold our first reponders for their excessive use of this energy-intensive material, but was disappointed.

Readers: What happened where you live?

Related:

12 thoughts on “Memorial Day among the Millionaires for Obama”

  1. Can you provide a link documenting the insane proposal of spending $100,000,000 to save $220,000 per year? What do they say when you tell them the math? And how do such idiots even have enough money to live in a town that could consider such an expenditure?

  2. Joe: I will email this to you privately. If I publish my notes from the recent School Building Committee meeting (4.5 hours with no bathroom or food breaks) that I attended I will be further ostracized in a town where questioning the optimality of a Hillary Clinton presidency is unacceptable.

    The school building enthusiasts have a religion whereby the same teachers and students in the new building will suddenly exhibit greatly improved academic performance. If you point out that this has never happened anywhere else in the U.S., as measured by test scores, that’s just a dictionary example of being an asshole (responding to an emotional/religious argument with facts and flogic).

  3. Phil, you live exciting and adventurous life!

    We are missing all the excitement – hired a baby sitter and going to see Solo with the eldest.

  4. Memorial Day for our extended family means remembering my late uncle Peter, killed on the very last day of WW2. The germans agreed to surrender at 12 noon on 1945-05-08 but they kept firing artilary right up until then. The morning of May 8 a mortar landed right beside Peter and killed him instantly – all within the view of his brother, my uncle Paul. Uncle Paul, now in his 90s, still has WW2 memorabilia proudly displayed in his house today.

  5. >What happened where you live?

    Mrs. Mememe and I finally submitted our federal taxes. We were able to do this electronically, without buying additional software With the refund we will be able to afford a desperately-needed, frugal vacation. We will rent a car to do so. The predatory ticketing practices of Forest Hills makes owning a car and parking it on the street too expensive.

    The costs of getting passports for our family of four makes foreign travel prohibitively expensive. I understand the fees for becoming a citizen are waived for the indigent. I cannot travel abroad so that foreigners can become fully vested in leaching off of the state.

    New York State taxes used to be able to be submitted electronically, whatever one’s income level, without buying additional software. As of last year, this is no longer possible. However, tax assistance is available in dozens of languages.

    I also went food shopping. EBT is the only English many of my fellow shoppers, mostly elderly ex-Soviets, understand.

    Tonight my family will enjoy the Mormon-inspired weekly Family Fun Night. We will begin and end it with a prayer. In my heart I will thank God for both his blessings and his curses.

    McDonald Park, where I type this, dedicated to the American soldiers of the Great War, is devoid of patriotic memorabilia, save for one small American flag planted in the ground by the statue if the kilt-clad McDonald.

    Thanks for keeping up this blog. It gives me a bit of hope and a place to vent.

  6. Her speech was a plea for more tax dollars to be spent so that unemployment and homelessness among U.S. veterans was reduced to 0% (i.e., every veteran would have a house and, if desired, a job). I.e., “religion” in our town is actually primarily “politics” (but with 99% of the parishoners voting for Hillary, is this not preaching to the converted?)

    It’s not logical to conclude that politics in your town is mostly about religion if a minister expresses a policy preference. It’s also unlikely that 99% of church members all voted for one candidate.

  7. Vince: “It’s also unlikely that 99% of church members all voted for one candidate.”

    For most candidates, actually, 100% of church members would likely vote for just one candidate because about 2/3rds of the candidates on our ballot are running unopposed.

    The presidential race is more hotly contested, however. https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/massachusetts shows that Cambridge was 46,563 to 3,232 in favor of Hillary. So there were 7 percent Deplorables, but would they attend a church whose ministers were gay and transgender? Go on the church-sponsored trips to the Arizona/Mexico border to help the undocumented settle into the U.S.?

  8. How do you manage to live day in and day out with the millionaires for Obama? I would find it suffocating. Another question is how these people got so rich with such lack of critical thinking. Meritocracy indeed.

    Btw – very funny article about Obama loving journalists (and a former Obama speech writer) posting up a photo on Twitter and blaming Trump for the treatment of immigrant children separated from their parents. However, it turns out the photo is from 2014 during Obama’s purge of immigrants (higher than the King Bush II years).

  10. A veteran of the cold war (I protected the beaches of Southern California from the Soviet Menace during the 80’s), I spent my day poolside. I’m not big on serious and formal ceremony. I’m more of a personal reflection sort. Phil, I don’t know if what you attended meets my threshold of serious and formal. I’m pretty certain you had a smirk on your face through much of the event. I can picture the commotion in your aisle as you try to get those around you to kneel and find it funny.

    The day started off rough. There were two sisters-in-law present, but they left early and things improved immensely.

    I smoked a brisket. My daughter and her boyfriend, the head brewer of one of our local breweries, were present along with a handful of others. So we had good food and good beer, which makes for a fine holiday afternoon. The day was capped off by watching the Vegas Golden Nights win the first game of the Stanley Cup Finals.

    We are under the flight path for the cemetery fly over. Yesterday we had a flight of WWII planes (SNJ’s I think) and a Cobra Gun Ship go by.

    Anon, that is a great story about your uncles. What a blow to the family to make it that far and lose Peter on the last day. All of my relatives involved in WWII have passed.

    (Think about the data stream of families with brothers named Peter and Paul over time. Every possible way you might want to track that data: percentage of families with two boys; percentage of families with two boys named Peter and Paul; heck, just Peter and Paul as names over time. You know they all slope down to the right. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.)

  11. Mike: I was certainly NOT smirking, except perhaps when suggesting to my Trump-hating neighbors that we should all kneel. I take combat bravery seriously because I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be exhibiting any!

  12. I know you can hold separate the solemnity of honoring service members ultimate sacrifice and a ham handed ceremony to honor them.

    If you want to see a crazy ceremony where solemnity if supposed to hold but doesn’t, come to Dallas next year for Palm Sunday. I’ll take you to a RC Mass where you’ll have a hard time keeping from laughing out loud.

    That Mass is a good part of the reason I’m a personal reflection sort as opposed to one who attends organized ceremonies.

Comments are closed.