Dueling holidays? It’s just Friday

Would you believe that today is a significant day when it comes to determining one’s political ideology?

It’s May 1, and just how you describe this day will give your enemies ammunition to use against you whenever they feel the need to dump on you for whatever strange reasons they concoct in their minds.

NOW AS SOME people of an international mindset will know, it is May Day. The day that officially marks the coming of the spring has been turned by many countries of a Communist orientation into a day of celebration of “the worker” (actually, the state that “owns” the worker).

But it’s a day for the workers of the world to think that someday they will unite.

That orientation is what caused groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars to make up their own holiday. It is Loyalty Day, and it is supposed to be the day upon which all Good Americans renounce the concept of Communism and spit on the very idea of May Day.

Not that anybody I know (or anybody who knows anyone I know) celebrates either holiday. For real people, the significance of May 1 this year is that it comes on Friday. So in a few hours, we will have the weekend upon us – one of the first of spring 2009.

IT SHOULDN’T BE a surprise that the concept of Loyalty Day dates back exactly 50 years. That makes this a significant anniversary for the holiday that does not seem to have caught on in the public’s imagination.

It is a remnant of the Cold War, and people who bother to acknowledge it are doing so most likely because they think someone will use their refusal to do or say anything about it as a sign that they’re one of the dreaded red hoard that thus far has failed to take over the world like the most paranoid among us in our society say it will.

I’ll have to plead my own ignorance. I had never heard of the concept of Loyalty Day until last week, when a municipal government that I sometimes cover for one of the suburban-based daily newspapers passed a resolution in support of the holiday.

So in many other municipalities, since the resolution had the feel of mass-produced rhetoric that could be passed by city councils across the country, residents are asked “to take full advantage” of having such a holiday to show how much they love their country.

IN ALL HONESTY, I must admit that the aldermen who voted in favor of a Loyalty Day resolution didn’t give it much thought. It was just another of the many routine resolutions with no binding authority that government officials support all the time.

I don’t think anyone is giving this so-called holiday much thought or concern.

If it sounds like I’m mocking the concept of Loyalty Day, you’d be right. And no, I don’t want to hear from the John Birch Society types that I’m expressing Communist sympathies. I’m just being realistic enough to say that this type of rhetoric is nothing more than a reminder of how absurd some aspects of our society were at the height of the Cold War.

Perhaps I’d see the need for an alternate holiday if the concept of May Day had ever caught on in this country. But it didn’t.

EVEN IN THE days when there was something of a Communist Party movement in this country (and most of those people were less enthralled by Moscow than they were opposed to the segregationist mentality that too many “real Americans” were willing to accept), the holiday itself wasn’t all that important.

In today’s day and age, there probably are many people to whom the thought of May Day is just as obscure as the VFW’s attempt to create a dueling holiday.

So I’m inclined to think we need to create a third option – one that I think is in line with the bulk of the population of the United States of America. May 1 is just May 1. We’ll see a few seconds of footage on the national newscasts (if we even bother to watch them) that tell us in some foreign countries that many of us most likely would not want to live in celebrated May Day.

We’ll snicker a bit at the thought of a pseudo-holiday, and perhaps at the thought of some clumsy oaf tripping over his own feet while dancing around the maypole.

THEN, WE’LL FORGET it until next year.

Because this year’s May 1 comes on a Friday, we’ll move on to making plans for our weekend. Perhaps we’ll spend some time with family members (or for some others, getting away from the family may be more enjoyable). The last thing I want to have to think about is an attempt by the VFW to continue to spread its 50-year-old rhetoric left over from a past age that is losing its relevance.

I don’t feel the need to crush “the Commies” at their holiday. I do feel sorry for anyone who in today’s day and age takes this kind of rhetoric seriously and feels the need to celebrate either of these holidays.

For me, it’s just a weekend.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Veterans of Foreign Wars issued their own statement about the need (http://www.vfw.org/resources/pdf/loyaltyday09.pdf) to continue the tradition of Loyalty Day, which appears to me to be even deader in this country than May Day.