This Memorial Day weekend, it seems everyone is staying at home. The sales at the stores are not great, nor does there seem to be much excitement, but a fair number of people seem to be buying alcohol. The cookouts that made this such an odd holiday are gone as well; no more groups of neighbors, watery overpriced beer in hand, standing around a smoking grille and talking as if they knew each other.

We cannot claim to be surprised by this, really, since national holidays have sort of faded away over the past couple years. It started with Halloween, when the people from outside the neighborhood drove so many kids to get candy that our subdivision basically just turned on the sprinklers and turned off the lights. Then other holidays faded too. We had nothing in common, so why celebrate them?

To your average "American" at this point, Memorial Day means a four-day weekend and nothing more. Soldiers who died fighting for -- well, what, really? Abstractions like freedom and democracy, apparently. However, most people are here because the streets are safer, the salaries better, and the toilets just work when you hit the lever. They have no allegiance to anything. They will move on when convenient.

The same thing happened to Christmas. Originally, it was a religious holiday for those of the Christian faith; when that wavered, it became a shopping holiday where you bought lots of stuff for people and had a fun time giving presents. Both were great holidays, really, because in the giving part of the ideal of religion was preserved and made strong, but over time, people forgot the giving and it became simply another accumulation-of-stuff day.

Come to think of it, the same thing happened to beef. It started as a recognition of the sacrifice of the noble cow and enjoyment of delicious meat, but then democracy incorporated figured out that if you ground the whole cow into paste, added soy, fried it hard and sold it with a trendy name, people would pay $5 for $1 of food. The steak became the sugar-infused cheeseburger (you can see why we used this as a symbol for Amerika.org).

On the block on which a friend of mine lives, national holidays are completely dead. Half of the block is Hispanic, and a quarter is mixed Asian, Indian, Muslim, Jewish, and Irish. The remaining quarter -- actual Western Europeans! -- basically keep to themselves because they have no reasonable expectation that other people share their values, customs, dialect, moral standards, or even intellectual level. They are prisoners in their own homes.

Why would they celebrate a national holiday for what, to them, is basically a nation-sized apartment building? It does not honor their traditions except in passing, and in fact it cannot honor them, because when one has dozens of ethnic groups, every group is marginalized. Maybe even equally. It cannot address their concerns, which include having a space for their genetics/people, customs, and values.

America cannot give them what they need. They need a place where they have control of their future. Each group needs to know it is in command of its own future, which requires excluding all other groups, and needs communities where its people and values hold sway. That means that the police, judges, politicians, businesses, and teachers are all from the group teaching values and ideas that advance the interests of that group.

In Machiavellian realism, we accept that every group wants to conquer every other group because only then is it stable and able to pursue the future it desires. Each group wants to dominate all others, take their stuff, and genetically subjugate them through rape and outbreeding. If they do that, they control their own future; if they do not, someone else does, which means that they will be eliminated.

When we combine these groups -- through diversity (within the nation) or globalism (abolishing borders) -- we end up with constant conflict. The only national holidays each group celebrates are its own, which means that "shared" holidays based in the political and economic system that (since we abolished culture in order to be multicultural) is America are ignored.

No one cares about Memorial Day. Those soldiers who died gave their lives for an illusion. They hoped that politics and economics could substitute for what is actually a nation, which is a culture rooted in the genetics of a unique people. They fought for that so that we could bring all these cultures here to fight with each other over who would define our future.

In America 2018 A.D., nothing is shared anymore. Like suburbanites retreating to their own townhomes, we all live in our own bubbles comprised of those who are necessary for us to achieve our individual interests: co-workers, socially advantageous acquaintances, people who share our activities, and those who provide us goods and services. Everything else is a miasma of chaos that we ignore because, as in all cases of denial, that which seems most firmly true is usually the biggest illusion.

Memorial Day this year is the equivalent of Teacher In-Service day when we were kids: a meaningless reason for a day off, and at that point, no one cares. We work too many hours and waste many more on bureaucracy, incompetence, and damages from criminality and vandalism. A day off is a day off, and no one looks too deeply into that.

In a broader sense, this means a lack of unity as a society. We threw out culture and heritage and replaced them with an economic system and a form of politics known as democracy, and so people settled on those two easy "bipartisan" ideals, secretly scheming as with all insincere agreements to dedicate as little energy as possible to this decay. We have nothing in common outside of that.

We know that an era has ended. The postwar era has given us almost a century of happy oblivion, interrupted periodically by well-intentioned but botched wars like Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Iraq. And yet, like all things based in illusions, this insouciant era of distraction has come crashing down because time interrupts all fond but not realistic thinking, and so now we face an increasingly grim, fractious, and unstable future.

In that time, Memorial Day will have meaning again. This time, it will not mean people who died for empty ideals like freedom, equality, and democracy. It will mean those who fought for your tribe, and since none of us in America -- and now Europe -- share a tribe, it means that we will all celebrate separate Memorial Days, silently scheming to dominate each other and finally be free to be ourselves.