Jason McCarthy 🇺🇸:
BBQ and cornhole and cool kid sunglasses and a boom box you can hear a hundred miles away. You’re on the ocean, you’re at the lake, you’re in your backyard, you’re wherever you are in this great big free country of ours. The sun is bright and the sky is blue and you open the cooler and grab all the beers you can wrestle against your chest. You pass them around to anyone and everyone, it’s smiles in every direction. This is exactly what summer in America should feel like.
As a dear friend likes to say, live big.
Memorial Day is a great day to be grateful to be alive, and to prove it. I barely knew the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day when I was a kid. Americans were not dying in war, which is also a great thing to be grateful for, because we weren’t fighting any. Sacrifice simply wasn’t at the forefront of our nation’s headlines, so it left no impression upon me. That would come much later.
It’s not a bad thing that we’re fighting more for the Roaring 20’s to emerge than we are at war — these things come in cycles. But the time is now for those of us who know the true meaning of Memorial Day — because we live it every day — to build a bridge to those who don’t. To invite them to do MURPH, to invite them to your backyard BBQ, to meet them halfway plus a little more.
And when you raise your glass to those who can’t be with us, do it with pride in your heart and share why, for you personally, Memorial Day is a great day to be grateful to be alive.
For me it’s because I have too many buddies who were too young who are buried in the ground now and I miss them. I feel guilty that I get to live this great life and theirs was cut too short. I hope to honor their sacrifice by leading a good life, but it’s impossible to know if you can ever fully measure up to such a calling.
And yet, they would all be the first ones to pass around another beer right about now, and to tell me to live big, so that’s what I’ll do, and what we all should do.