In an indirect way, today being Flag Day reminds me of last week on the family reunion-vacation with my oldest brother who was career Army. (Ret. Lt. Col). As I was walking to the beach I ran into him talking to an older man who lived year round in the house next to his. My brother said, "Tell him, didn't I help bring down the Berlin Wall?" I said "Yep, he did." He was stationed in Germany at the time and when he heard it was coming down he tossed his family in the car and drove from where he was stationed and helped tear down the wall.
BTW we were married on Flag Day since it was a state holiday and that way at least my husband would always have it off and I could take it off. The state several years later took the holiday away!
I sent my older son an email about Flag Day and asked him if his company was going to do any emails about it. He disagrees that it is the generation that runs Google that tossed it out the window.
He said, "Well it's more like the Baby Boomers threw it out, last mention of the President or Congress turning it into a holiday was in 1945. If they had made it into a real holiday vs a "week of observance" perhaps more people would celebrate it."
He then quotes from a New York Times Opinion article on it:
"Then, for the 1960s generation, it became more or less the epitome of square: a vaguely embarrassing grade-school memory to be filed alongside duck-and-cover drills and mandatory prayers. Flag Day never regained much of its former cachet in the decades that followed. "
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/unhappy-flag-day/
The opinion piece begins with this:
"It was destined, eventually, to become the runty stepchild among American national holidays. One hundred and fifty years after its original creation, no one ever hosts a Flag Day cookout or sends a Flag Day greeting card. Nobody gets to take a long weekend away from the office. Even the most customer-hungry car dealers don’t advertise Flag Day sales.
And today, exactly 150 years ago after it was first celebrated, almost no one seems to have noticed the anniversary. Google searches for “sesquicentennial of Flag Day” and similar phrases yield exactly zero hits.Yet the holiday was inaugurated in 1861 with promises of revelry to rival the orgiastic festivals of ancient Rome: feasting, dancing, garlands of flowers, and Arcadian bliss among the towns of lower New England. It also began amid one of the most thrilling and tempestuous moments in American history: the beginning of the Civil War. It marked a turning point in the definition of national identity, and of the flag itself. And it seems to have originated — like so many American cultural phenomena — as the offspring of idealism and commerce, midwifed into existence by journalists.
It all started with an editorial in the Hartford Evening Press. The piece’s writer, the paper’s chief editor, was Charles Dudley Warner, who would eventually become better known as the co-author, with his friend Mark Twain, of the 1871 novel “The Gilded Age.” (It was also Warner who made a famous remark often attributed, wrongly, to Twain: “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”) Warner apparently undertook the editorial at the urging of a friend, a Hartford banker and staunchly Unionist Republican named Jonathan Flynt Morris."
See link above for rest of article.
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