I had a pretty uneventful Memorial Day. In fact, I wasn't really even planning on going home until I woke up Monday morning and decided on a whim to hop on a train. The only real Memorial Day-related conversation I had was over dinner with my dad, brothers, grandparents, and brother's girlfriend, when my Grand mom announced that she had unsubscribed to the Philadelphia Inquirer. She was doing the cryptogram yesterday morning, only to find upon completion that the hidden message was something along the lines of, "Patriotism is the foundation for which innocent people will die for trivial causes." I can't remember the line word for word, but that was the gist of it. I was blown away that the Inquirer would put that in their newspaper. Not only is it a slap in the face on Memorial Day, it's just bad marketing. The target audience of cryptograms is little old ladies like my grand mom, who probably won't appreciate an anti-patriotic encryption over their morning coffee. Pacifists and war-mongers alike will agree that to call the underlying reasons for our nation's armed conflicts trivial is a harsh understatement and insensitive to people whose family and friends have died for our country. There are so many other justified adjectives to apply to our country's war reasonings than trivial. The word itself doesn't imply any morality. It doesn't take a stance on anything. It would've been more understandable if they had just said immoral or unjustified. Trivial makes it seem like the hard work and sacrifice of thousands of men and women means nothing, has accomplished nothing. And why Memorial Day? If you wanted to put a hidden, ill-worded anti-war statement in your newspaper bashing the reasons why thousands of people have died, surely you could've picked a better date than the day when we're supposed to be honoring them to do it. The Philadelphia Inquirer is a liberal newspaper, I understand that and I'm sure its subscribers do as well. But that's not liberalism. It's just a bad attempt to be edgy and I'm sure it lost them a lot of subscribers.