The only price Americans should be concerned with this Memorial Day

The meaning of Thanksgiving, a day originally set aside for Americans to be grateful for what we have, has been forever perverted by retailers like Kmart, Best Buy and Macy’s who keep their doors open that day to lure in bargain-crazed shoppers hoping to buy discounted merchandise made in third-world countries they can give as gifts to people who will return it all the day after Christmas.

Slowly, insidiously, those same retailers have, in recent years, been setting their marketing periscopes on what many consider to be an even more sacred day on our national calendar, Memorial Day.

Virtually every retail chain in the country now runs Memorial Weekend sales that, naturally, offer extra discounts on the actual day set aside to honor our war dead. God forbid management miss out on the opportunity to rake in one incremental penny of profits. And God forbid Americans actually bow their heads in remembrance of those who died fighting for our freedom rather than spend that day fighting each other over the last pair of size XL stretch pants dangling from the rack at Wal-mart.

It's disgusting and something that isn't confined to retailers at your local mall. I take particular umbrage with German and Japanese car manufacturers whose dealers are flooding the airwaves with commercials for Memorial Day sales “events.” (Pearl Harbor was an “event.”  Toyota-thon isn’t.) I’m sure I sound like an old fogey, especially in light of a recent study that shows that nearly 40 percent of Americans have no idea who we fought in WWII, but if it weren’t for the German and Japanese carmakers whose factories cranked out tanks and airplanes during that war, Americans would have several hundred thousand fewer graves upon which to place foreign-made flags.

While many – probably most – of those manufacturers now build a substantial percentage of their vehicles destined for American consumers here in the US of A (where labor is cheap – they may have lost the war but won the economic battle), the fact of the matter is the profits largely flow back to German and Japanese shareholders.

I don’t know about you but, come Monday, I won’t be rushing to Sears, Dillard's or Target, or running out and buying a Honda or BMW because I've been promised discounted prices. Yes, I'll probably grill some burgers and might even spend part of the day at the beach or taking a long bike ride, but I'm also going to set aside some time, as every American should, to reflect on those who paid the ultimate price.


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