June 1 – With the sun beaming down, the band marching, crowds cheering and Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts handing out American flags, Memorial Day was a refreshing gathering from more than a year of lockdown.
It makes some people feel very glad to live in rural Pennsylvania.
It also looks like people are turning the page on COVID.
More than 100,000 people were at the Indy 500.
The NBA and NHL had packed arenas. Finally.
Attorney Clint Barkdoll, Pat Ryan and Michele Jansen talked about Memorial Day this morning on First News.
“People are ready to move on,” Barkdoll said. “I think there is a lot of pent up demand, people ready to get back into doing the activities they were accustomed to that they lost out on last year. I think it’s great. I think you’re going to just keep seeing this with each passing day and week as we get into the summer here.”
But with all the feel-good coming from the communities around us, it’s rather odd that the President of the United States felt the need for dire warnings over the holiday.
Ryan said, “Leadership starts at the top. Whether it’s borough council, whether it’s this country. Then you start pushing back and turning away from leadership that just has this dour, sour, you stink, we stink, we’re all awful. I look at President Biden and I think you’ve got to champion the good here. That was the great part about Trump. He loved his flag. He loved God. He loved his country. He’s not the perfect man by any stretch of the imagination, but damn it, he was a great cheerleader and what we’ve got right now is a chump.”
During one of the speeches President Biden gave yesterday, he said democracy is in peril in the United States.
Barkdoll said, “I thought that is not a great message not only to be sending out on Memorial Day of all days, but I think it’s just contrary to what the vast majority of us feel. This is a great place to live and it’s still the greatest country in the world and to come out on Memorial Day with that kind of a statement, it really was kind of this downtrodden belief or attitude and I was a little surprised in the respect that it was done on memorial day and I don’t think it went over well.”
Jansen added, “It’s this idea that people keep saying they’re teaching children to hate America and I know that sounds very strong and hyperbolic, but when he (Biden) acts like our country is so mired in this crisis of oppression. It’s an ideology coming out of academia that sadly is making us sound like we live in some kind of horribly oppressive country. To put that in the Memorial Day speech…we live in the freest, most prosperous nation in the world. The least racist, despite everything you hear. Try going to other countries around the world and have the kind of freedom of speech that we have here. You don’t find it. So to always be harping on whatever things we still have to work on because we’re human beings and we still all have things to work on, it just strikes people very odd that the president is doing this and I can’t help but think it’s purely for political reasons.”
Ryan noted, “I think you see the push back. The rolling of the eyes at people that are just calling everything a crisis.”
Barkdoll, “The president should be our top cheerleader. I realize sometimes people say well you can’t just sugarcoat everything, but in a general sense, the president should always be a cheerleader for the country, just like at the more local level, the governor should be a cheerleader for the state, the mayor should be a cheerleader for your town. I think we need to hear that. Yes, we need to hear the bad news, too. We know there are things that we need to work on and address and improve, but I just felt on Memorial Day to come out with the quote, ‘democracy is in peril,’ I just felt it was very out of context and tone deaf of all days.”
