MAY 1, 2021 – Today, “May Day” (not to be confused with the pilot’s distress call, derived from “m’aidez!”), is when you were supposed to hang a homemade May basket, filled with candy, on the outside door handle of your girlfriend’s house, hit the doorbell, and run as the girl chased you down for a kiss. That was the idea, anyway, as told by at least one of my oldest sisters.
I don’t remember that it ever worked out that way. Either the basket strap—a piece of construction paper glued to the actual basket (also made out of construction paper)—broke or came unglued, thanks to candy overload or . . . poor construction. And the girlfriend, so-called, gave up the chase, when I ran full tilt back to our house and slammed the door in the girl’s face to establish—lest there be any doubt—that I’d won what I thought was . . . a race.
We made May baskets at school too, which, actually, is what gave my sisters and me the whole idea of making them at home. Inevitably, we made them for each other—but without the chase and kiss business. The school versions too were strictly for show and platonic exchange.
It surprised me to learn years later that May Day commemorated something far more sinister than candy and construction paper. It was when Communists and Socialists (birds of a feather) went on parade waving red flags in celebration of International Workers’ Day. We’d been taught that those people and their “screwy” ideas were antithetical to May baskets, candy, and a chase for a kiss. Communists and Socialists (capitalized to instill fear) threatened our “way of life,” which included all the candy we could eat and an abundant supply of high-grade construction paper in various colors—not just red.
My learned fear of all things red—except construction paper—was heightened when I heard about May Day military parades through Red Square in Moscow. The display bristled with the latest Soviet pointy missiles—all aimed at American cities—and goose-stepping soldiers looking in the same direction, symbolic of how everyone in a communist (i.e. “socialist”) country was supposed to conform as dictated from on high.
Yesterday I read how President Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, fed with wire-tap information by J. Edgar Hoover, were convinced that Martin Luther King, Jr. was either a Communist himself or in the tight clutches of people who were. The Administration applied supreme pressure on King, who responded in shocked disbelief. In retrospect, it all looks so quaint, misguided . . . and evil.
Which brings me to the present. Wanna see political discourse jump the rails? Toss in “socialism.” Don’t bother with “communism.” For some reason “communism” is as dead as the political-economic theory associated with it. But “socialism”? It’s as alive and well as the first of May.
As for May baskets, candy, and kisses . . . I think those went the way of May Day parades.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
