Memorial Day - Will it mean less when all the WWII vets are gone?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was listening to NPR’s coverage of Memorial Day and it was all about WWII vets. I’ve been to local Memorial Day parades and the majority of marchers were WWII vets.

Do you think the Memorial Day holiday will have less meaning and fewer parades, etc. in 20 years when all the WWII vets are gone?
whistlepig

2

Dunno about less “meaning” than implied by its current existence as an excuse for sales at the home-repair store or the car dealer and the first big cookout. As for fewer parades, maybe. I’m having trouble picturing the Gen-X and Gen-Y vets of the Desert Wars going for the whole old-style thing.

I’d settle for more understanding of the meaning even if it means less visible ceremony.

3

I don’t think so- after all, the original Memorial Day was a post-Civil War occasion, that got expanded to include later wars.

It’s not about veterans, despite what nonsense the news media comes up with. Memorial Day is the US equivalent of Remembrance Day (Nov 11) in the UK, Canada and Australia. It’s about remembering those who were killed in wars, not those who lived.

Veterans’ Day (Nov 11 in US) is about remembering and recognizing the contributions of those still living servicepeople. It may wane a tad with the passing of the WWII vets, if only because of the dwindling number of vets in the country.

4

Well, the “nice” thing about modern technology, even if TV and the internet is slowly reducing us to little more than a pair of eyes with reproductive organs attached, is that we’ve got a large body of audio and visual material from the wars since the Civil War, so that these things can be replayed on TV to remind us of those who went so bravely off to war. An NPR commentator in talking about Saving Private Ryan said that one of the reasons he thought that WW II movies would be making a comeback had to do with the children of WW II vets trying to understand what it was that their parents went through during that time period, and since many of the vets are dying off, the only way for people to understand what happened is to watch dramatizations of those events.