Decoration Day Quotes

“Decoration Day--
created to honor
the enslaved African-Americans
in the Civil War
who fought for their own emancipation
and liberation
and for the health and integrity of
this country.
American History stole that one, too.
Made it Memorial Day.
All Soldiers Matter?”
― Shellen Lubin

“I am memorializing
the just-barely-adults
(mostly boys, mostly less privileged)
who have died fighting wars that
for the most part
were not their own...
the families
who have had to go on without them...
those who gave their life to this country
by standing for our freedoms in non-wars--struggles--
struggles about race, religion,
gender, sexual orientation,
contraception and abortion rights,
the environment, eradication of global disease and world hunger,
the right to collectively bargain and unionize...
who paid the ultimate price
through their civil disobedience, protest, collective action,
or just by living in a way that was so challenging to others
that they were executed for it...
the ones
from whom we stole this land
and those whose lives we stole
to build it...
those who were just trying
to go to school, pray, shop, watch a movie, be,
when they were gunned down in a country
that loves its guns
far more than its people...
those who were killed for
driving while black,
walking while black,
talking while black,
sleeping while black.

On Decoration Day we are decorated
with their blood
and their memory”
― Shellen Lubin

“Integrity, America. You lack integrity. The degree of distance between how we want to see ourselves and how we are is enormous. Integrity. Individually and as a people. We lack integrity.

As an individual, I have long known that the only hope for integrity is not only the effort expended to live up to our word, but the willingness to own how and where we have not, and to hold ourselves accountable for the consequences of that.”
― Shellen Lubin

“America, you whitewash history, literally, and leave out much of its meaning and discovery. And, as we try to get better at uncovering these truths, so many who want to pretend otherwise fight and legislate to push them back underground, to once again bury them.

There are so many discoveries that have been found and made, and then buried and left for us to re-find (or not)--discoveries about autonomy and equality and peace and compromise and respect for all the creatures who inhabit the planet and the planet itself. Our written history has destroyed the voices of the people from whom we stole this land and the voices of those whose lives we stole to build it, the voices of women and children and people whose skin color or language or belief system did not fit the status quo of the time and place where they lived. All were destroyed because it did not serve some lust for power or control or just because the people in charge of such things really did not believe they were very important, or refused to believe that they should be.”
― Shellen Lubin

“T’aint’ no use to look for public sperit ‘less you’ve got some yourself.”
― Sarah Orne Jewett, Novels and Stories: Deephaven / A Country Doctor / The Country of the Pointed Firs / Dunnet Landing Stories / Selected Stories and Sketches