Stepping past fallen bodies and around broken ambitions, you and your fellow patriots and freedom fighters surge forward to capture the last of your enemy’s forces and win your freedom from an imperialistic world power.
Before too long, that day is immortalized as a holiday. Within a few generations, about the time that your children’s children have their own children, people have begun to forget what you did. Even if someone who made a huge difference in the world is still alive, future generations usually don’t care enough to ask about what he did on that day so long ago; they just want to get drunk and party.
That’s where we are. A few generations on and we’ve completely forgotten what holidays like Cinco De Mayo, Memorial Day and U.S. Independence Day really mean. People before us left their families, left their homes, put their educations on hold and gave us a portion, if not all, of their lives to make life better for us, the children of their future.
“How do we repay their immense sacrifice?” one might ask.
The answer would have to be that we just forget about them and try to enjoy the day off that they worked so hard for.
Religious holidays, like St. Patrick’s Day, also get the same treatment; do we care about the man God used to bring Christianity to Ireland before the European Continent was plunged into the Dark Ages?
You’d think this would matter to us because our nation grew out of the initial efforts of British Christians (the Pilgrims) who likely would have never heard of Christ’s virgin birth, death and rising from the dead, had it not been for centuries of Irish Monks diligently copying the scriptures that St. Patrick brought them. But people don’t care about any of this.
They just want to have their Harp Ale down at Hennessey’s Tavern and pinch anyone who’s not wearing green on a visible level.
It’s pretty sad that we don’t care enough to remember the people who fought and died in war and worked in peace to give us the way of life that we claim to cherish. To actually hold our freedoms as dearly as we claim to, we must, right now as students, begin to care about making them last.
This means voting and keeping current on what elected officials are up to and actually doing something about it instead of just being armchair quarterbacks to the political system. If you see that a program on campus is under-funded, go talk to the faculty; see what can be done about it.
If it turns out that the college is under-funded, start lobbying the state: write a letter, get a petition out.
Don’t just sit there with a sparkler in one hand and a beer in the other on July 4 saying what a wonderful, or horrible, nation we have, do something about it, keep liberty and freedom alive and well.
It’s not bad, or unpatriotic to have a party on any of these holidays, but do not forget why those days have been set aside as reminders to us and future generations that there were people who went before us and laid out our heritage with their lives. These individuals deserve to be remembered.
These holidays should come as a reminder that freedom has a cost, be it religious freedom or governmental freedom in the U.S., Mexico, Ireland, or Europe and we must continue to pay that cost for our sake and the sake of our children and their children.
Think of the future as the spring holidays roll by and mark off the past.
