Daily Dose of English 57
Memorial Day
Daily Dose of English 57
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about Memorial Day, because the day that this episode is coming out, which is May 27th, 2024, it is Memorial Day. And Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the U.S. A federal holiday means that it is celebrated on the federal level, and federal is the U.S. government. Because if you don't know, the United States really has two different governments, really 50-ish. There's one government which is called the federal government, which is like the White House, the president, the army, those sorts of things sort of higher up. And then we have each state also has its own government. So there's the government of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho. I don't want to name all the states, but every state has its own state government. And this actually means that the United States is a republic, technically, in terms of how the government works, where there's sort of two different parts for where you live. But this holiday, Memorial Day, is a federal holiday, so the entire country celebrates it. The entire country has a day off. It's the biggest thing. It's not a specific day, so it's not every May 27th. It's the last Monday in May. which is, I don't know if this is a common thing in other countries, but there's a couple of different holidays in the U.S. that fall on a specific day of the week rather than a specific date. So we had Easter not too long ago, which is always on a Sunday. Memorial Day is always on a Monday, that sort of thing. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, et cetera. And so, for example, next year, it's going to be on May 26th and in 2026, it'll be on May 25th and until the end of time. The first Memorial Day was celebrated on the 30th of May in 1868. And so it's been around for a very long time. And it happens annually, like I said, every year. And it was made to be a day of honor and mourning for US military personnel. So those are some kind of fancier, bigger words. So honor is when we remember people in a positive way and we respect their memory, if that makes any sense, in terms of somebody who has died. And mourning is when you are sort of intentionally, not necessarily sad, but you think about these things, about somebody's death, and you think about their life, and you mourn for their passing. Saying sort of internally that you want to remember them. or their memory and what they did and that sort of thing. And that's what honor and mourning is in terms of military personnel. So military personnel are people that were part of the army or the various branches of the US military, which is the actual sort of the larger thing. Because we have the air force, the military, or air force, army, navy, I think there's a couple more, but I don't really know very well, honestly. And so there's a whole day essentially dedicated to that. Some people go to cemeteries and visit the gravestones of people who have died. however it's not that common honestly it's mostly for people or families who have family members that were in a war or died in the war or served even and so it's it's a little bit more not dedicated not dedicated that's the wrong word it's a little bit more a part of people's lives if they're connected to the military in some way which a lot of people are there's a lot of um families in in the united states that are connected to the military in some way whether it's um they're they're serving or they're on um oh i forget what it's called there's a Oh no, this is so bad. But there's a, the reserves, aha, I do know what it's called, sorry. The reserves are people who aren't necessarily in the military, but they've gone through training and they're saying that if we need more soldiers, I will be part of the military. They're sort of in secondary, if that makes any sense. They're in reserve, which is why it's called the reserves. And so there's a lot of people that are in the reserves, there's a lot of people that did serve in the military, that have now retired from the military, or who still are part of them. There's a lot of people, millions of families that are connected to the military in some way. And so plenty of people do celebrate it. However, there are more families and more people that are not connected to the military and don't really do anything for Memorial Day. A lot of people just see it as a day off, another day where you don't really have to do anything, and that's sort of the entire way that it's seen. I, for example, didn't grow up with any connection to the military pretty much at all, and we never did anything for Memorial Day. It was just a day off, a day not to go to school because, yeah, there wasn't anything to celebrate or to talk about or to mourn to going back to those words. And so I don't actually have a ton to say about it because it is not a super connected thing. to my life or my past, so I don't really have a ton to share. And so I'm actually just going to talk about a few different things just related to the holiday until we finish out this episode. And so there's not really a really strong We don't really know exactly how it started. There's a lot of different cities or people who say that they started Memorial Day and claim to have the documents that said that they started Memorial Day, that they're the first ones who put flowers on the graves of soldiers. However, there's lots of different cities that have said that, so they're not all necessarily true. A lot of these do come from the American Civil War because that's when, a little bit after the American Civil War was when it first started being celebrated, right? I said 1868 and the Civil War was in the sort of 1860s. I don't remember exactly when. Here I actually have the webpage open so I can check. And I believe the aftermath was in 1863, and so it was around that time, the 1860s-ish. So yeah, that's when it started, and probably in the South where the war was mostly fought, so in states like Virginia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Georgia, and there's a lot of different places that started to celebrate the fallen soldiers, right? um especially specific ones there was people would go to famous war soldiers graves and they would put flowers um for quite a while there's i believe there's even some statues that were put up in the honor of various soldiers and then things have happened all throughout history obviously there's lots of different dates here that i'm when i'm looking at the web page right now But nothing else really looks that, I guess, interesting. There are different monuments in different parts of the country still. Some of them are celebrating different sides of the war, different generals, that sort of thing. Honestly, it's... Okay, I think I'm going to change the topic a little bit because I don't have a ton more to say about this and I want to talk a bit about, I guess, just the military in general because I don't necessarily know much about it because I try to not think about the U.S. military and war because of the things that have been done by the U.S. and its military presence and the amount of money and time and energy that we pour into our military feels very wasteful in a lot of ways because of the So we want to be the biggest threat in a lot of ways, which I don't agree with and feels a little bit, I guess, gross, right? I don't know. Just having so much money in war, just doesn't make me happy. It doesn't make me feel like it's a better country or a better place necessarily. And that's one of the things that I am not a huge fan of in the US. And so there's a lot of, which is part of the reason that I can almost struggle to talk about this holiday a little bit is because it's, it feels like it, like it's good to honor people who have died, obviously, but it's not, but it just feels like we're, honoring something that shouldn't necessarily have existed in the first place. Yes, people are always going to fight. You kind of can't avoid wars in the entire world ever just because that's how humans are. But it always feels like a bit of a shame when so much effort and time and people's almost worth is focused on an act of violence in a lot of ways. And that just makes me a bit sad. So anyways, I hope that you enjoyed this episode at least a little bit. I know that I talked about some pretty random things and was trying to find words here and there, but I hope that you understand why and maybe learned a few things and I'll see you again tomorrow for another normal episode. See you then. Bye.
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