Monday, May 26, 2008

Memorial Day Cancelled in Sugar Land

It’s Memorial Day again. Here in Texas, Memorial Day is a day when hundreds and thousands of American flags get planted on the parkways in neighborhood streets. Indeed, as I was driving through Sugar Land yesterday I a spotted city crew unloading scores of flags off a city truck and planting them at the four corners of an intersection. My own street has a large American flag pushed into the parkway grass in front of each house.

In Texas, Memorial Day, flagly speaking, is really just another Flag Day.

This year anyway.

Now last year at this time, in the city of Sugar Land’s Town Square, they really put on a Memorial Day extravaganza. I wrote all about it. It was a Republican gala put on by Republicans for Republicans. Only they had to invite Nick Lampson, a Democrat, because he was their congressman.

That event’s organizer, 4th Precinct Constable Troy "Dogman" Nehls, read my commentary and responded by giving me his cell phone number, telling me that I could call him any time if I had some suggestions.

My point then was that Memorial Day is for everyone. It’s a bipartisan holiday. I guess my only suggestion to him would have been to make that a little more obvious. Not that it would have done any good. It seems that since then, Constable Nehls, who is a captain in the US Army Reserve, has been called to active duty in Afghanistan. It came as a surprise to him I think, in that in a January 2008 reelection news release “Nehls did not expect to be called again to active duty before his planned 20-year retirement in July 2008”, but just one month later he was shipped off to Afghanistan to serve in the Army’s “Civil Affairs Unit”.

So even if I had delivered my suggestion, another person would be organizing this year’s Memorial Day Gala in Sugar Land.

Or so I thought.

Now, come to find out, this year’s Memorial Day observance in Sugar Land has been cancelled. Exactly why I don’t know. All I know is that its new organizer, Chad Norvell, is Nehls’ Chief Deputy, and I suppose is acting constable while he is on active duty.

So yes, I am a little curious. What could possibly be behind a failure to get this thing off the ground? Republicans are actually giving up an opportunity to wrap themselves in the flag during a presidential election year. Now I know that there are factions in the party of the Dark Side, but at this point I would only be guessing at whether the political infighting therein was ultimately responsible for cancellation of a patriotic event.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if that is exactly what happened.

So instead of attending a Memorial Day event today and blogging about it tonight, I suppose I’ll have to join the ranks of millions of Americans and eat some barbecue. But while I am at this right now, I might mention that there is a pretty good Op/Ed piece on The Chron you can read. A Memorial Day piece written by our next United States Senator from Texas, and another reservist, LTC and State Rep. Rick Noriega. It seems Rick is a little ticked that his opponent would rather send troops in harm’s way than vote for a new GI Bill. Cornyn voted against this bill, along with 21 other Republicans

I think we all should be just a little angry about that. But save your anger for the fall when we will award John Cornyn with an early retirement package.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hal, we had a U.S. Senate race in my native Illinois a long time ago in which one candidate's campaign slogan was, "Do you want a work horse or a show horse?" If we translated it into Tex-Mex it would be something like, "Caballo o yegua?" Stallion or mare?