Get ready for three days of music, food, games, dancing, shopping, and that indefinable canyon magic that makes the annual Memorial Day weekend Topanga Days Festival one of the highlights of the year! This event, which is the main fundraiser for the Topanga Community Center and all the programs TCC offers to our community, is celebrating its 51st year, and it’s going to be great! We have all the information on this year’s festival in this issue of TNT, and we look forward to seeing you there, and wish all of our readers a happy and safe holiday weekend! Cover design by Urs Baur.
Memorial Day marks the unofficial start of summer and beach season. Here in the canyon, it brings both the madly inventive Memorial Day parade, and the highly anticipated three-day Topanga Days festival. This is the 51st annual Topanga Days, and tickets are already for sale. In fact, rumor has it that there is so much demand this year that the event could potentially sell out in advance, so get those tickets now. We have all the details on page ?? This is the non-profit Topanga Community Center’s main fundraising event. The money raised will help fund the programs that help Topanga residents live fuller lives, from youth activities to the Canyon Sages.
Topanga Days takes place on all three days of the holiday weekend, and offers music, dancing, food, shopping, games, and more, but on Monday, the day Memorial Day is officially observed, canyon residents gather on the boulevard for the parade. It’s never the same twice. There have been vintage cars, horse carts, bicycles, unicycles, stilts, a rickshaw, and once even a UFO complete with an alien crew. Those who aren’t participating gather along the route to cheer on those who do. When the parade ends everyone goes home to breakfast or off the festival or on to whatever else they have planned for the day.
Critics have been heard to lament that festivities like these obscure the reason for this federal holiday. We disagree. Memorial Day—Decoration Day back then—was established in 1868 to honor the Union soldiers who died during the American Civil War. This holiday was in response to the efforts of Mary Ann Williams and the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Georgia to decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers with flowers. It’s estimated that between 258,000 to 290,000 Confederate soldiers died in the war.
The losses for the Union were around 365,000 Union soldiers died in that conflict, and 282,000 wounded. The total deaths on both sides, including civilians, from the war is estimated between 616,222 and 1,000,000.
After WWI—“the War to End All Wars”—Decoration Day began to change into Memorial Day, a day to honor the fallen US Soldiers. An estimated 116,516 to 117,000 US soldiers died in that war. Around 407,316 U.S. military personnel died a generation later in WWII, and there were 36,574 US casualties in the Korean War a few years later. That was the first war that wasn’t officially a war. President Harry S. Truman preferred to call it a “police action” and never requested a formal declaration of war from Congress.
There were 58,220 U.S. military “fatal casualties” during the Vietnam War. That one was also a police action.
The Iraq War cost the US 4,605; the Afghanistan War, 2,459; and the Persian Gulf War, 383.
The current not-a-war in Iran has cost America 13-15 people so far. Iranian losses stand at over 3,400.
Every one of those lives in this litany of destruction was cut short. These people didn’t get the privilege of living and growing older and experiencing all of life’s joys and sorrows. And they left behind grieving and stricken families whose lives were changed by loss. The ones who do come home are often scarred physically or psychologically. Research increasingly shows that that trauma can be generational, passed down to children and even grandchildren—a brutal legacy.
It is important to remember the dead on Memorial Day, not because dead soldiers are heroes or that their deaths are glorious, but because their loss is tragic, and war— even when it is given a polite euphemism like “police action”—comes at an almost unimaginable high cost to human lives, one that rips the fabric of all of our lives.
What does any of this have to do with Topanga’s Memorial Day festivities? Each life snuffed out in war changes the future. These are lives that were never lived, their futures and everything they might have achieved in a lifetime cut short.
Grief is important, but those of us here now can remember the dead best not by weeping at their graves but by living our lives to the fullest, and by celebrating life, not death. Topanga’s wild, crazy, colorful, joyful, Memorial Day weekend does exactly that. It celebrates peace, not war.
Stay safe, be well.
