Memorial Day 2018

I had thought that this was just a day to remember the dead--a day on which one gathers a big bunch, of the many flowers available in these climes at this time of year, and goes to the cemetery to decorate the graves of family  and friends.  That's what it meant to my mother, long ago in the 1950's: She had no idea (or certainly never communicated it to me) that Memorial Day had anything specifically to do with the peculiarly named Armed Services, as, according to the Wikipedia which I just consulted today, it does, or is supposed to. And now that I know that Memorial Day is officially almost exclusively about "honoring the memory of those members of the Armed Services who have died for their country," I feel rather sick.  It is 73 years, by my reckoning, since anyone fell defending my Homeland; most of them are buried overseas.  To say, as it is apparently expected that we should say (think and believe), that those who died in the Korean "War" or in the "War" in Vietnam (which were, by definition, war crimes, not wars)--or Mosul or Kabul--ought to be honored in the same way that we honor those who fell in World War II, is fucking blasphemous.