THE MEMORIAL DAY NEIGHBORHOOD

I'm ready for this weekend's soaring rhetoric. It's always a boost. And yet for some it's going to be a bust.

Memorial Days are usually about remembering our past in order to better anticipate our future. But right now, many historians are busy lamenting our impending future based on our recent past. To put it another way, they're saying: There goes the neighborhood!

The neighborhood is us some 234 years after a terrific start, but currently in a terrible stall. Things have been going from good to bad and now bad to worse. Like any troubled neighborhood, folks there always blame their handiest target -- the "other guy." As in the president, the bankers, the generals, the executives, the immigrants. But that's angry, simplistic Tea Bagger thinking. And that kind of thinking isn't thick enough to cut it.

More serious Memorial Day historians might instead compare the great American Empire with the decline and fall of the great Roman Empire. They have a point. During the 5th C that neighborhood looked a lot like ours. Too many debts and stresses inside; too many enemies and encroachments outside.

However, listen carefully for this weekend's Memorial Day oratory will be about the stout national institutions that have held the neighborhood together all these years. Such as the government...the banks...the businesses....the schools...the courts...the churches and temples.

All true. But now all in trouble. It's precisely these institutions which have been failing us lately. Government stalled in stalemate. Banks corrupted by greed. Businesses heading over cliffs. Schools failing to educate. Laws failing to hold. And religions losing the faith of their own followers.

There won't be many historians giving Memorial Day addresses. However, their institutional concerns are worth considering. When Rome's institutions fractured, a brilliant empire collapsed into a barbarous dark age where rogues ruled the countrysides of Europe. Perhaps reminiscent of today's al-Queda, Iran, South Korea, Somalian pirates, and roaming survivalist bands.

Will that be our fate by some future Memorial Day...? In the 4th C the Church took the role of Rome as the one only sustaining institution to which the people could look. That didn't aways work out so well. This time will it be science and technology's turn to play that role? Or if not them, who?

In another 20 or 30 Memorial Days we may have the answer. For now, I'm happy we have a Memorial Day I can still recognize....