Memorial Day is not what it once was.

I write this from a campsite deep in the pine forests of northern Michigan.

Spring has barely sprung here. Blossoms and leaves are just coming out on the trees, the nights still approach freezing, and if you're like me and decide to take a dip into Lake Michigan, you'll have to enjoy water that's a crisp 41°F.

Nearby, the coastal town of Traverse City sits on the end of a 32-mile-long bay that opens into the vast stretches of the Great Lakes.

Named by French explorers, it was settled several hundred years later in 1847 by a captain from Illinois who built a sawmill.

In recent decades, the city has become increasingly liberal, turning the sleepy cherry farms and rolling wine country along the coast into a summer getaway destination for rich liberal boomers. Money has poured into the area as big names like Pete Buttigieg have descended on the town. In 2015, the city of 16,000 people was celebrated for electing its first gay mayor, because now we celebrate politicians based on who they like to have sex with.

Like many wealthy liberal boomer towns, it is largely divorced from the policies its liberal residents vote for in the wider world. Like Martha's Vineyard, it enjoys the concept of diversity … from a certain sort of distance.

The city still has a small Memorial Day ceremony to honor the dead Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, and Airmen who have made their rich liberal boomer life on the coast possible.

Two hundred or so people still gather to decorate the graves. A handful of flags also line the main road into town.

But like many places now, Memorial Day weekend doesn't really feel like a day of memory. It doesn't feel like this remembrance of dead American men and women, nor their sacrifice, nor their valor, unites us anymore.

As my family perused Traverse City's shopping district this weekend to get cherry products, wine, and fudge that this area is known for, I noticed a number of Indians and Arabs crisscrossing the streets alongside us. In a store called Cherry Republic that sells all sorts of cherry-themed goodies, I waited for a free sample of cherry pepper jam behind two Indian women.

Instead of taking a small dollop and moving on, the women each grabbed a fistful of crackers and spread globs of jam on each one, taking several minutes to do so.

As I waited, now more curious in this societal science experiment than the jam, I observed a Muslim couple carefully looking at the food labels of other samples, most likely to make sure they didn't accidentally eat any jams, salsas, or spreads with bacon.

Outside on the sidewalk, loud voices in Hindi could be heard. Nearby, a whole group of Arab men gawked at a friend's new Tesla as their hijabi wives scampered off to do shopping.

I have visited Traverse City many times and have relatives who have called the area home for more than 60 years.

It feels different now.

Certainly, there are plenty of "normal" American hotspots. Breweries, beer gardens, and retro arcade bars are filled with American families. So are the local campgrounds. Local farm stands still sell homemade cherry pies. Third-generation fishermen still dot the coastline. Tourism, including international tourism, is the lifeblood of the economy.

But Traverse City, like most American cities, is changing quickly.

American farmers, like farmers everywhere, are being priced out by government regulation and spending that has bankrupted us and devalued our money.

Locals complain that developers and buyers from out of state, or out of country, are planting their own colonial flags by scooping up American land for their own interests. The locals in northern Michigan have the same grumblings as the locals in cities from Houston to Maine:

More than 650,000 Americans have shed their blood to make and keep this nation. I wonder, as I gaze out at their graves, what they would say about my trip to Traverse City.

My fate is to be buried, like them, as a dead American. Their story is my story. Their heroes are my heroes. Their land is my land. I know, like they knew, what it means to be an American. I know it deep, deep, deep in my bones.

But the Indian H-1B husband who is yelling at his wife in a foreign language? The Muslim Arab guys from Dearborn? What connection do we have on the streets of Traverse City other than a common interest in window shopping?

What about the wealthy, 65-year-old liberal couple that is buying a new pair of Birkenstocks and a new Yeti cooler for their yacht before heading back to their vacation home on the bay? Their culture feels more and more foreign to me by the day.

And the Millennial dog parents who love liberal activism and weed? Outside of a shared language and a shared future without Social Security, the only connection we seem to have is that they want people who vote like me to be dead.

Along the sides of the main road into town, hundreds of American flags had been placed by a handful of local volunteers. The local Lowe's still honors the fallen.

But Old Glory seems like a dead symbol these days.

She's planted by the roadside, but people are just as likely to sneer and leer at her as they are to feel one iota of national fraternity.

As I watched the migrant tourists shopping across Traverse City, I wondered: What do they care about those "broad stripes and bright stars" that held "through the perilous fight"? As I looked at their Michigan license plates, I thought of how I am told they are just as American as me.

Perhaps they are. Perhaps the same blood of liberty runs hot in their veins. Such things are possible.

But for the majority, speaking in their own languages, hanging out with their own people, practicing their own dress and traditions, the only contact with America - the true America - are flag displays that line the road.

The one event I saw this weekend that truly felt unifying - that united both participants and spectators alike as countrymen - was Traverse City's local marathon.

7,500 runners ran through both rain and shine along the Grand Traverse Bay. Tens of thousands of friends and family members showed up to support them. There was pain and sacrifice, but celebration and rejoicing at the finish line. The camaraderie could be felt. It was so thick, so palpable that you could almost touch it.

It felt, well, like Memorial Day should.

It's what every American once felt when we visited and cleaned the graves of our fallen heroes, and taught our children the sacrifice it took so we could be free. It's what every American knew deep in his or her bones - a weight of glory from the fallen that echoes forward into our hearts today.

This unifying culture still remains ... in pockets. It is no longer the norm. It is no longer the standard. We do not live in the United States anymore. We live in a confederacy of cultures that grow more balkanized and scattered. Ineffectual politicians distract us from this with cutesy slogans about liberty and duty while they happily manage the decline of their global tax scheme.

America was once a specific people in a specific place and a specific history, but it was also a nation with a specific God. The "gods" of the rest of the world are now rushing into the God-size space we hollowed out and tried to replace with stuff.

Can you blame them? Can you blame them for seizing the opportunity, especially when it comes with fun shopping trips to idyllic towns?

If we want to make Memorial Day great again, we have to remember that Providence made this nation. First we forgot God, then we forgot our heroes, then we forgot ourselves.

The only way to find ourselves, and America, is to remember. 🇺🇸

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.