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During the Easter season, real Orthodox go out to the cemeteries and visit the graves of their loved ones. We tend the graves and lay symbolic offerings of food and flowers on them (often, Easter eggs). However, on Easter and during Bright Week, we can’t offer Pannikhida, the first opportunity is the first Monday after Bright Week. Since many monasteries keep Monday as a day of abstinence, the custom has arisen of celebrating Radonitsa (Day of Rejoicing) on the Second Tuesday after Easter. Mind you, you can lay offerings on a grave on Easter and Bright Week (we certainly did), but you can’t offer Pannikhida. In the above image, people in Minsk are visiting family graves, offering a toast, and giving due respect. Radonitsa isn’t “canonical”… it’s a “people’s feast”… the Church didn’t decree it, the people just did it. Now, if some would just get their long noses out of books…
BMD
Voices from Russia 
11 November 2014. It’s VETERAN’S DAY… Remember Those Who Didn’t Come Back… Honour Those Who Did
Tags: holidays, Holidays and Observances, memorial, Memory Eternal, patriotic, patriotism, political commentary, politics, remembrance, United States, USA, veteran, veterans, Veterans Day
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Whether one agrees with a war or not, I’d say that the soldiers are the least to blame for them. The officers only follow orders from the political class, and the PBI, the grunts, the spear-draggers, the ordinary sods who actually get shot at, have no blame at all. Don’t get angry at them… they’re only soldiers. What does anger me is how coward politicians who didn’t serve themselves (nor do their sons serve) abuse the bravery, courage, self-sacrifice, and patriotism of the troops. Note well that most of the rightwing pundits who scream for war refused to serve. Note well that most of the loudmouth Republican warmongers refused to serve. Here are some of the screaming yellow-bellied anti-patriotic GOP jingoes:
None of these posturing cowards has a moral right to call for war… but they do. If this doesn’t tell you that the Republican Party is an irredeemably evil organisation, nothing will. It’s one thing to call for war having served in the ranks oneself… it’s quite another to call for war after having refused to serve (as Richard Cheney put it, “I had other things on my agenda”). No one seems to notice the sheer anti-patriotism of the GOP. “Money for me, bullets for you; I got the gelt, the hell with you”.
Honour the veterans… they put it all on the line. As for the pols, the less said, the better. I don’t want to stink up a Day of Honour with such shit…
BMD