SPECIAL DAYS What is the charm and special meaning any particular day in our lives?
Each new span of hours we call “a day” comes to us a fresh and wonderful opportunity – a “rough” - unfaceted gem awaiting the magic kiss of light which will awaken its universal elements to reflect the realities of love and living; of honor and respect and other enduring aspects of the better side of human nature. It must be chipped, shaped and properly polished to suit Mankind's standard of beauty in the particular era of discovery.
Older men and women seem to have a set reply when greeted with any expression concerning the arrival of another good day. They say: “At my age - any day that gets here is a good day!” Each timed they repeat it they heart as something they had “just made up. Hearers laugh as if it were.
All days are special to someone. It is true that we make them what we really want them to be, I suppose, but certain days are special because we have been told they are by someone who thinks they should be. That being the case, it must be, then, hold true that all days mean many things to different people!
You birthday date, for instant. So do thousands of other people! You can easily finds long lists of people born on our birthday date and decedents will, no doubt, chat lightly about the number of persons who died on the same day you will.
Do we, indeed, honors a citizen as having been outstanding when we name a special day in his or her memory? I have come to doubt that it is a good thing. It serves well to give the founders a few good feelings of having done something to remember the departed one, but it is really a good, dependable means of seeing to it that the designated one is systematically forgotten, sorted away in our national annals just short of being f raged, obliterated, or run through the shredder.
Do you realize that we, as a leading nation on Earth, so “honor” just one man...and one only...today? There have been many more – both men and woman of nationally and internationally-known persons so many, in fact, that you may well be, even now, making a hasty list of those you can recall. Forget about the names of individual Presidents. We now observe “President's Day” honoring all in a single national holiday whomever they were.
The only national holiday honoring an individual man is our latest – that observed for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
I have met with some insist that we honor the name of Jesus Christ as we observe the Christmas Holiday. One can observe such an invitation to argument only with concerns about the nature of legislation we have received, are getting and may have handed to us at any time by our legislative and judicial area occupants.
A.L.M. February 11, 2006 [500wds]
