When you’re a kid growing up, you have no real concept of how best to honor your parents. It’s only when you’re a parent — or when your parent has left this earth — that you start to ponder the meaning of honor. What is it to honor someone? What is it to honor someone’s memory? Why did someone do so much for me personally and how can I possibly repay that debt?

And how on earth do you ever repay someone who gave their life so that we can have our freedoms? That is nearly beyond comprehension.

Of course you can never, ever truly repay the debt because it isn’t a debt. Selfless love is a gift, and you can only hope to bestow your own personal gift on someone else. The current phrase for this is to pay it forward. You honor your heroes not by looking backwards and reflecting, but by doing something for someone else.

On this Memorial Day, it’s important we reflect on honoring the lives of our past heroes, but also reflect a little bit on how we could pay it forward. How we could honor them by doing our own heroic deeds for something worthwhile. 

With this thought in mind, I’ve been contemplating about whether we truly have any problems here in Western New York. It’s the traditional economics scenario between normative and real: How would we like to see things taking shape and how are things really taking shape. Engineers would label this as the difference between people living in the real world and people living in a dream world.

We live here for a reason. We must like it. That’s the real world thinking. We have to build some bridges among our own people, repair and mend some fractured cultural differences among neighbors and friends. It’s time to worry about keeping our own sidewalks clean, as they say, before we criticize what others are living their lives.

No matter how intellectual we may pretend to be, we cannot escape where we live. When we see a mine collapse in Kentucky or West Virginia and watch the hour-by-hour updates where life and death hang in the balance, we’re struck by the working conditions that got the miners to this point. How could they possibly put up with such conditions? That’s our particular bias clouding our thinking. In the coal world, that’s a job; it’s a paycheck; it’s a college tuition payment for their child so they don’t have to work in a coal mine.

So when we read about Niagara Falls school district employees doing private work on government time, is it any different? Maybe someone in their McMansion in Clarence is outraged at residents in the Falls and what they’ll put up with, etc. But who are they to criticize? To the Falls school district resident, is this such a big deal? Everyone or their relative has worked for the school district at one time or another, so what’s the big deal? It’s a job; it’s a paycheck; it’s a tuition payment for their child so that they don’t have to come back and work in that sort of environment.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the need to build bridges as our only way to progress, and that’s more and more the key to our ability to make our hometown the epicenter for all we dream it can be. The person who can bring the normative thinkers together with the real thinkers will truly be worthy of a statue in the center of town.

On this Memorial Day 2010, 10 years into a new millennium which holds so much hope, let us pause not only to honor those who fought to physically defend our country, but to return to our roots. Before it was called Memorial Day, it was called Decoration Day. It is celebrated at this time of year to note the time of reunification of North and South after the Civil War. Let’s reflect on how difficult reunification and reconstruction must have been, and live up to the high standards those brave men and women gave us.

It’s time to live Memorial Day every day, not merely use this weekend to get an extra 10 percent off at the big-box store. As John Prine says, “your flag decal won’t get you into heaven anymore.”  Embracing our local differences, learning to heal and walk together again, is far more patriotic than a bumper sticker.

Someone, somewhere, died hoping we would do this. It’s time we honor that dying wish.

Tom Christy has decided to take a break from his political column, but if you’d like to follow Tom’s writings you can continue to do so by registering at www.fair-government.org. He encourages communication and can be reached via e-mail at aim1986@mac.com. We’re sure we’ll see him around in some capacity in the near future.