I work as a reporter in a city of 90,000 in Massachusetts. Doing a little digging in our archives, I discovered that, in 1974, 20,000 people attended the city's annual Memorial Day parade.

It was raining that day, too. I've been covering the parade in my town on and off for 23 years. I have never seen a crowd of 20,000, no matter the weather. A couple quick calls to reporters I know indicate that they, too, have seen attendance decline. The Veteran's Day parade is suffering a similar decline.

It's time to cancel. Cancel the parade. Cancel the long weekend. Stop putting the flags on the graves. The whole thing is becoming an embarrassment.

Let's keep posting on Facebook, though. You know, a picture of the flag and under it the touching words, "If you stomp on this flag, I'll stomp your #$$, you @*^%%$)$%! That's the kind of patriotism you can display at home, in your chair, in your boxer shorts. That's the kind of patriotism you can display even when you're way too drunk to drive downtown for the parade. If it weren't for principles, you can express drunk, on Facebook, in your underwear, many of us would have no visible principles.

Every town I know has some kind of Memorial Day event that is sparsely attended and is filmed and broadcast by the local public-access channel, right between "Marie's Crochet Corner," and the Mass in Spanish for shut-ins.

And, since the Internet world is so very, very compact, one has to assume that ISIS is watching these sad little tributes and gloating.

"Hey, Ali," Muhammad says. "How many people in Fall River, Massachusetts?"

"I Googled it," Ali says. "Maybe 90,000."

"Yah, well they got maybe 5,000 people at their Memorial Day parade," Muhammad says, giggling fiendishly. "These people aren't going to fight us to the death. They're gonna sleep late, wake up, get drunk and go back to sleep."

"They post some brave stuff on Facebook, though," Ali says.

"Who cares?" Muhammad says. "Fourteen-year-old girls have Facebook pages with pictures of their cats. We can put 50,000 people on any street anywhere in the Middle East for a "death to America" rally."

Time to cancel. For all our sakes.

Yeah. Sure. Every good American likes to blow off about "honoring the troops" and kicking some ISIS butt, but other than the guys who have to go to war, it doesn't look like anyone cares enough to drive downtown and stand through a couple hours of high school marching bands and flags.

Where I live, a lot of veterans are downtown every day. The dead ones, for whom Memorial Day is designed, are not there but the nearly-dead are, bumming cigarettes, shaking all over with heroin withdrawal, asking for change.

It's a smaller parade, that daily one, but it goes on every day, without fail, until the last of the people with enough money to beg from leave the downtown and head for the suburbs.

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, "Marc Dion: Volume I," a collection of his best columns from 2014, is available for Nook and Kindle.