Decoration Day, 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Died in vain

I was talking about this with my Bride today. She said that she didn't see how it made a difference where, when, or how you died in war; whether you died storming the Normandy beach to crush Nazis or blown up by an exploding latrine while waiting for orders in the War of Jenkin's Ear.

I replied that it was all part of the implied bargain that we the troopers made when we raised our hands.

We promised to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies. With our lives, if it came to that.

They - the Constitution in the form of our People, our government, our Army, and our officers - promised to hoard those lives and ensure they were spent as frugally as humanly possible.

The Old Lie is one thing.

The Old Lie, when the lie is told as part of a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing?

That breaks the bargain.

And that got me thinking of how many bargains have been broken in the Plague Year.

So I posted this to my FB page today:

"Pandemic Timeline, Day 157: It suddenly seems utterly weird to be having a "day" about dead American soldiers when EVERY day hundreds and even thousands of Americans are dying all around us. Weird. And wrong."

And a dear friend immediately spoke up about his disgust that the federal government had decreed an official day of mourning with the national flags flown at half staff for the dead of COVID-19; "Couldn't have waited another few days to let us honor fallen soldiers?"

And I understand that. I do. I know he and his family have a very dear friend who was killed in Iraq, and I'm sure they still feel the pain of that loss.

Our dead are with us always.

But this was my reply:

"But these poor suffering bastards are dying for their country - in the sense that they're dying because of decisions their government made - as much as anybody who got killed at Bataan or Fallujah.

As an un-fallen soldier I'm as angry and grieved at these losses as I am about the lives we threw away in the Middle East or Vietnam. Even the rhetoric - "heroes" - is the same, whether we send GIs into the streets of Basra with hillbilly armor or nurses into the plague ward with homemade masks and re-used gloves.

I understand how you feel, my friend. But I'm too sick and too cynical to feel the outrage. Our country has decided that we are all expendable. So let the poor sods have their flag. We're all being driven into the minefield now."

And with that, I find that today I have nothing more to say.

Except, as always, this.

Down Among the Dead Men

So on Memorial Day I ended up in the old Civil War cemetery at Poplar Grove.

It's peaceful and pretty and very manicured, very much in the tradition of the more modern military cemeteries, a sort of pocket-Arlington.

Until you look at the rows of stones, and realize that way more than half of them aren't "headstones" at all but simply stone blocks with a number carved on them.

These were the remnants of soldiers that lacked any sort of identity; nothing marked their original grave - or, it it had, was gone by the time the graves registration parties reached it - and nothing was left, if there had been anything, of a tag or scrap of paper with a name on it.

There was just some bone, and scraps of cloth, and probably some less savory remnants, to be gathered up and put back in a hole with a stone with a number on it for the following hundred-plus years. An empty chair at a table, an empty peg on a wall where no coat was hung, an empty house to which the scraps of bone and cloth never returned.

Perhaps even more grim were the separate files where the men of the U.S. Colored Troops were buried, still put apart from the white soldiers, still separate and unequal in death as in life.

All in all a very unsettling sort of day, one that raised more spectres than laid them.

Forgiveness of the Dead

On this day, 64 years ago, Americans gathered at the cemetery at Nettuno, near what had been the terrible charnel-house beachhead of Anzio, to dedicate what would become the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and to "honor" those killed in the war that had just ended.

You know how I loathe all the flag-waving, pontificating, self-justifying “memorial” dog-and-pony shows that serve only to make the living feel better about themselves and their willingness – or, worse, eagerness – to cheer on others to die for their country if it wasn’t for those dang bone spurs.

The closest to fitting "memorial day" act I’ve ever read of was LTG Truscott’s address that day.

Truscott had commanded the VI Corps at Anzio, and a lot of the dead guys there were from his outfits. And he was a hard man, known to be kind of salty, and was probably more sick of hearing the pious patriotic platitudes than I am.

So when the opening caprioling was done he looked out over the rows of “dignitaries” and reporters and guests, turned, and faced the rows of silent markers behind the rostrum.

Nobody knows exactly what he said – probably because there was either no plan to record his words or because he couldn’t be heard – but based on Bill Mauldin's account the gist was that Truscott didn’t see how there was anything particularly good or heroic about getting killed in your teens or 20s or 30s, and that while generals and politicians would tell you that all your dying was noble and sacrificial that most generals, anyway, kinda suspected that was pretty much bullshit.

He agreed that lots of them had died because somebody, maybe he, had fucked up and if that had happened he was grievously sorry and apologized to them. That he knew that was a big ask, but that he owed it to them to ask their forgiveness anyway.

And that he promised that if, in the coming years, he ever ran into anyone tubthumping a line of guff about the glory of war and heroic death that he, Truscott, would tighten the joker's shot group damn quick smart.

So as far as I’m concerned it'd be great if every damn politician and talking head can stay the hell away and leave those haunted graves to the grass, and the sky, and the dead, and those who knew and loved and lost them.

They won't, because that's not how we do "Memorial Day". But I wish they would.

But I will be in that cemetery today, sharing a drink with my Army brothers. I hope you will, too.

And, as always today, this.

Momento Mori

I never quite know how to deal with this day.

Typically I simmer all day in a sort of low, sullen...not quite anger, more like...irritation, like a peat fire smouldering deep below the surface. My fellow citizens' clueless, careless, indifference to the whys and hows their soldiers died is bitter gall, and the unfortunate alternative is a kind of fawning reverence for some imaginary soldier who has "fought for their freedom" that is almost more irking than the cluelessly indifferent.

I understand that most of these people are trying to say or do something "nice" on a day that has been set aside for what they dimly sense as a sort of patriotic celebration of GIs. They usually have no clue that this is something different from Veterans' Day, and, like a drunk at a wedding, proceed to either offend, with their jingo patriotism, or by their hiding their eyes from the abyss that is death in war.

I want them to just say it; "These men and women died not for me but because of me, because of my choices, or because I chose not a make choices. And many of them, and all of them that have died since the end of the Korean War in 1953, died for damn near nothing, died chasing the ghosts of my fears and ignorance. They died because I thought of dominoes, or of Evil Empires, or of fighting them there so we wouldn't have to fight them here. They died because I let unscrupulous men lie me into fear, into foolish anger, into hate. They died because I was a bad citizen.

And I have never come to terms with that. I've never admitted that, or repented of that, or apologized to the dead for my acts or my indifference."

I know that won't happen, and that galls me, too. We Americans are bad at things like regret, repentance, and apologies.

So I'll say it here.

Fuck, I'm sorry, guys.

I fucked up. I trusted people I never should have. I didn't rage with fire and steel against those people who killed you. No, not the people you fought. The people who sent you to fight for nonsense, or hubris, or greed, or stupidity. And once I knew that they were fools, or criminals, or both I did nothing to punish them for murdering you. They still live, many of them honored and respected, while you are nothing but dust and ashes.

I am ashamed.

All I can promise is that I'll try and do better in the future. I'll try and make sure that they can't make any more of you.

That is all.

Take a break in place and smoke 'em if you gottem.

And, as always on this day; this.

Decoration Day 2014

My daughter is up early, as usual. She's just a natural morning person, and she loves to watch the "My Little Pony" reruns the kid channel shows before 9:00am.

I've been trained into getting up early ever since my first week in Reception Station, so I get up with her, and we cuddle, and then I go make coffee and check my e-mail and my Facebook feed.

Today, as always, there are all sorts of "inspirational" stories about soldiers and "tributes" to the recent veterans of our land wars in Asia, because, frankly, most civilians haven't the slightest fucking idea of the difference between Memorial Day and Veteran's Day but they do feel a sort of vague sense of wanting to do the "right thing".

And I'm sitting here reading my friends Facebook posts and I can't help but think this as I read all the Memorial Day stuff.

I'm glad you're thinking about your soldiers today. At least for one day. I'm glad you are concerned about them and wish them well.

But, frankly, if you really care for and want to do something for American soldiers, you might want to be paying more attention to what your "leaders" are doing in your name. You might want to take a hard, hard look at those people who want to send your soldiers into harm's way to accomplish impossible missions like "fighting terrorism". You might want to work against electing morons who have a penchant for doing moronic things like starting land wars in Asia. You might want to think about what happens to those who don't die in wars, and that only those dead have seen an end to war. That the VA "scandal" is really that a coterie of grifters and sonsofbitches lied to you that war could be painless and cheap, waved a flag and frightened you with the idea of dusky terrorists under your bed and you bought it, or, at least, you did nothing to stop it, and now there are thousands of young men and women who will take the mental and physical wounds of those lies to their graves.

You might consider that the best way to honor our war dead is to make damn sure that our "leaders" have damn good reasons for making more of them.

I know most of you here already know that.

But you might take a moment to remind your friends who don't that they might take a moment to consider all that before they return to their regularly scheduled barbeque.

Dies Irae

I post this every Memorial Day. I don't feel quite the same level of suppressed anger this year as I did in the "Support the Troops" Dubya Years when this weekend became a pep-rally for wars that most U.S. citizens were utterly indifferent to other than as entertainment. But, still.

I have little or no hope that I can ever change the way this "holiday" is celebrated. There will be parades and movie festivals. Warplanes will flyover baseball stadiums. Flags will wave. People will "thank" someone in a uniform for service that was neither done for them nor has profited the serviceman or the civilian.

Few, very few, will visit a war cemetery and ponder the reasons we seem incapable of not making more war dead.

But I will continue to post this every year and hope.

It seems to me that the VERY best thing for the majority of Americans would be to think of this Memorial Day not as time reserved for barbeques and softball in the park, but as the time it took a 19-year-old private to bleed out, alone amid the dying crowd in the grass before the wall at Fredricksburg.The time it took a husband and father to convulse his way into death from typhus in the tent hospital outside Santiago de Cuba.

The time that the battalion runner, a former mill hand from Utica, New York, spent in a shell hole in the Argonne staring at the rest of his life drizzling out of his shattered legs.

The time it took for the jolting trip down the Apennines to the CCP, unfelt by the father of three because of the jagged rip in his gut wall that killed him that morning.The time required to freeze a high school kid from Corvallis, Oregon, to the parched, high ground above the Yalu River.

The time it took for the resupply bird to come to FSB Albany for the plastic bag that contained what had been a young man from the Bronx who would never see the Walt Frazier he loved play again.

The time taken up by the last day in the life of a professional officer whose fiance will never understand why she died in a "vehicular accident" in the middle of a street in Taji.I've been proud to be a soldier. But the modern view of war as video entertainment for the masses sickens me. Every single fucking human being needs to have it driven into his or her forehead with a 10-penny nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out a world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were once the windows to an entire universe.

That the price we pay for "forging our national will" is paid in the unlived futures of those we kill and those of us who die to make it so.

Maybe then we'd be sure of what we want, and what we do, before we open the goddamn doors of the Temple of Janus.

De Morituris

I have a post that has been my standard for Memorial Day for years. But this year I'd like to think less about those gone than those still here.

Since 2003 the U.S. seems to have slipped into a bizarre schizophrenia. Our attitude towards the expeditionary wars we have ginned up since the end of the punitive campaign in Afghanistan has varied between a cynical resignation to a hesitant distaste. Meanwhile, our attitude towards the ridiculously small, self-selected group of people who have fought them "for" us has varied between a sort of passive bumper-sticker patriotism to an exaggeratedly disproportionate "gratitude". Charlie Pierce has a fairly good summation of this;

"Now, for the veterans of the two wars of the past decade, we're giving them all kinds of favors and goodies and public applause, and maybe even a parade or two, overcompensating our brains out, but, ultimately, what does all the applause mean at the end of the day? We are apparently fine with two more years of vets coming home from Afghanistan, from a war that 60 percent of us say we oppose. But we support The Troops. Will we become a more skeptical nation the next time a bunch of messianic fantasts concoct a war out of lies? Perhaps, but we support The Troops. Will we tax ourselves sufficiently to pay for what it costs to care for the people we send to one endless war and one war based on lies? Well, geez, we'll have to think about that, but we support The Troops."

The Army I joined, the post-Vietnam, pre-Reagan Army of the early Eighties, had a pretty cynical attitude. We'd seen our brothers, the men who were our platoon sergeants and First Sergeants, used up and then tossed away in RIFs after the end of a war that we tried desperately to pretend that we'd "won" because we were never beaten in the field. We referred to the Army as "the Green Machine" and had a pretty good understanding what the priority of "accomplishing the mission" meant to the "welfare of the troops" if the mission meant that a lot of those troops would die for and in the usual ratio of "pointless" to "contributing-to-the-accomplishing-the-mission".

We understood - because we'd seen it or lived through it - that our "leaders" both civilian and military would "lead" us into unprofitable wars, lie to us about their cunning plans to "win" them, and then toss us aside like used contraceptive devices after the inevitable ugly mess ensued. We had heard the rhetoric about "freedom" and "peace" and knew that as often as those terms meant their face value they were a happy-face sticker for "whatever advances our policy" and "make a wasteland". We were ready to do the things our government told us to do while being pretty cynical about the combination of ambition, distraction, uglification, and derision that determined the way our government would decide what those things were and how they would sell them to the herd.

This stands in fairly dramatic contrast to the current volunteer force, where supposedly: "Six out of seven soldiers and Army civilians, [a new study] reveals, trust their senior leaders to make the right decisions for the Army, and 90 percent of those surveyed remain willing to put the Army’s needs above their own."

This trusting and sacrificing seem both disproportionate and inappropriate after the concatenation of lies, damn lies, and statistics that have characterized the "War on Terror". It would seem to me that having watched one administration lie it's way one war and another continue a second long after it's sell-buy date that it would behoove my country and all Americans to pause on the day we set aside to honor those killed in wars and consider just exactly what it means to "trust" their "leaders" with the lives of their fellow citizens absent any indication that that government, and those leaders, are willing to do the hard calculus to ensure that the exchange of those lives in return for the advancement of the national interest is a transaction that justifies the cost in wrecked lives and shattered bodies.

So. I'd like to think that this Memorial Day that my fellow citizens would do more than just pat the yellow-ribbon magnet on their bumper in a hat-tip to those of my fellow soldiers who went to do their nation's bidding and never returned. I'd like to think that those citizens would remember that the intent of the Founders and Framers was that We the People are supposed to be sovereign.

That it is supposed to be in our names those lives are given or taken, and that if we allow - or, worse, encourage - those who we elect to throw those lives away in the pursuit of lies, or impossibilities, and then once those lies and that nonsense are exposed, do not hold those people and ourselves to account, then we have failed to honor our pledge to them, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

And, hey; I like tradition as much as the next guy.

Opening Doors

Twenty-six years ago this October I spent a long half hour under some sort of Caribbean bush with a man about my age. We didn't have much to say. And he couldn't say much, anyway, being dead.

I didn't know, and never learned, who he was, or how he had come to that lonely little hole, under the roadside bush, to be killed defending his hardscrabble little island from the power and the glory of the United States of America. But there he was. Twenty-something years of diapers and lullabies, stories and tears and hugs, schoolbooks, scoldings, ideas and ideals, love and fear and hate and hope had come down to this; face-down in his scattered effluvia, eventually to be dragged away and tipped into a hole and covered up like trash.

His place at the table forever vacant, his memory slowly fading.

I'm here, today, with my wife and my children and my house safe around me. And a lot of that was because of the willingness of my people to fight - in the Revolution, against slavery, against fascism - and, yes, to die.

But I'll bet that if you could have asked him, he probably would have asked for nothing more.

And, as always:

"It seems to me that the VERY best thing for the majority of Americans would be to think of this Memorial Day not as time reserved for barbeques and softball in the park, but as the time it took a 19-year-old private to bleed out, alone amid the dying crowd in the grass before the wall at Fredricksburg.

The time it took a husband and father to convulse his way into death from typhus in the tent hospital outside Santiago de Cuba.

The time that the battalion runner, a former mill hand from Utica, New York, spent in a shell hole in the Argonne staring at the rest of his life drizzling out of his shattered legs.

The time it took for the jolting trip down the Apennines to the CCP, unfelt by the father of three because of the jagged rip in his gut wall that killed him that morning.

The time required to freeze a high school kid from Corvallis, Oregon, to the parched high ground above the Yalu River.

The time it took for the resupply bird to come for the plastic bag that contained what had been a young man from the Bronx who would never see the Walt Frazier he loved play again.

The time taken up by the last day in the life of a professional officer whose fiance' will never understand why she died in a "vehicular accident" in the middle of a street in Taji.

I'm satisfied with my Army service, and don't kid myself that there will be a day when the killer ape "studies war no more".

But the recent enthusiasm for war as video entertainment for the masses sickens me.

Every single fucking human being needs to have it driven into his or her forehead with a steel nail that every single day in every single war some person dies a stupid, meaningless death that snuffs out an entire world in a moment. That those empty eyes zipped inside a bag or covered by a bloody blanket were the windows to a universe that is forever lost.

That the price we pay for forging our national will is paid in the unlived futures of those we kill and those of us who die to make it so.

Maybe then we'd be sure of what we want to achieve before we reopen the doors of the Temple of Janus."

(cross-posted, as always this day, from GFT)

Memorial Day with an Update

"So, where've you been?" you may ask, as some have.

I've never really left, dropping a few comments here and there, from time to time. But I'm at that stage of my life ( I hit 60 next month ) where one starts thinking about one's impact upon the universe.

I don't want this to go on about me, as there is someone else who precipitated what I'm writing here, as you shall soon see. But I imagine that you would want at least something about the former. It's sufficient to say that this year has not been good so far for me. Last year I was demoted from full-time to part-time teacher for reasons I won't go into here, but I was OK with that since I was qualified to retire from my work for the state. State pension + part-time pay was good enough for what I needed. I got another part-time minimum-wage job outside education to accelerate house payments, and life seemed to be back on track.

This past February my principal informed me that due to budget cuts I would not be asked to come back this fall. March I get T-boned and lost our car, but not life or limb. May, I'm threatened with termination from my second job and I'll be damned if I get fired from anything the first time ever, so I quit. And to top it off ( I hope! ), our computer gets zapped by lightning. A tip: even if it's soft, distant thunder, yes, it is very possible to get zapped.

So here I am, looking out at a "doughnut hole" of 2 years before Social Security kicks in, getting by on less than 20K per year, and no health insurance unless we give up all, drain our savings, and live in our car. Luckily, we're both fairly healthy, although the wife hasn't been able to work for years.

Furthermore, my Outrage Account is very much in the red for a whole lot of reasons. We're not moving and I'll be looking for work. Many school districts in the area are looking for janitors, so maybe I won't have to leave education after all!

All this leads to Joe Meadors. He's another old fellow who apparently does not know how to quit, roll over, shrivel up and die. I had planned to write on another completely different topic, maybe later, but recent news intervened, and so did a veteran from our military, Joe Meadors. And it is Memorial Day. OK, a day late.

Coming up June 8 is the 43rd anniversary of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty, Joe's ship. He survived that. He was with the Gaza flotilla that was confronted by the Israeli navy a couple of days ago, and as of this writing, he's confined in an Israeli jail. He's got to be in the same general age range I am in, so why did he do it? A chance to give the folk who killed his shipmates a poke in the eye? True concern for a truly suffering community of people? I don't know about any of that. But what we all know is that he's a veteran of our country's military doing something to help others anyway he can. Trying to fathom why would just be guesswork right now.

I do know that killing and wounding and dying and suffering in war are truly perverse. It is not what our capabilities and intelligence call us to do. However, I'm sure we've been doing that ever since whatever creature that could be called human first arose from our far dim past. There's no end to such conflicts in sight and that's a terrible pity. Indeed, Memorial Day does recall the horrific scenes of war and great stupidity, but it also recalls sacrifice, love and compassion, even for the enemy.

We all need friends to encourage us, we need examples to inspire us and to show us how. We've had many over the course of human history and veterans like Joe and so many others like him, veteran and non-veteran, past and present, will always be there for us to see. For these things on Memorial Day 2010, I'm extremely grateful.

Update for the Update: A couple of clicks from here and look what I stumbled upon. A heartwarmer to start your June.

bb

Memorial day.../sigh...again...and yet...

I went to church yesterday and sat in the pew with my wife.
Church is a moment where I escape from the world...well, as much as my fellow parishioners and pastor will conspire enough to allow me a moment to think in silence about something other than the world and how badly we're trying to bury it in ashes.
And so yesterday, conveniently in my own cocoon, safe within my intellectual walls of a congregation a betrayal occurred that one could say was quite like the Roman Senate and Julius Caesar.
Yes, the traditional Memorial Day Paen to all things military.
Fuck me.
I had forgotten.
Shit.
Yes...those were my thoughts...in church...and I'm sure G-d and I are going to have a long talk about my impatience with my fellow brothers and sisters...but seriously...of all places...in church?
"who do you remember on this day?" And of course, the Pastor whose brother served in Vietnam as a Buff pilot led the discourse on memories many lanes. So a video was played that tugged at the corner of ones eyes about a daughter whose daddy was dead in the ground all her life, but hey, writing letters to a dead person is emotional currency...especially for a video.
Well, everyones but mine because I'm thinking.
fuck me, fuck me, fuck me.
Sorry for the language, but this is what I was thinking in church...like I said, G-d and I are in for a long Q&A...I'm sure I'll he'll be tossing my Q's right back into my face so I can get my A's that I want...but right now...fuck me!
"freedom isn't cheap, and my daddy said there are somethings worth dieing for...like our freedoms."
What the fuck?
When were our freedoms ever jeopardized from an outside source?
The last existential threat to our freedom came from Britain in 1812, and let's be honest about that one...it really wasn't an existential threat to us as it was to rid the continent of an obnoxious pest who was making "claims" of ownership...the rest of the time after that we have been fighting for everyone else's freedom, or for our businesses to have the freedom to screw over another part of the world...but my freedoms, and yours?
No, sorry, the only existential threat to my and your freedoms, sunshine's, is the lot of you willing to use your freedom as currency for a mythical security you will never ever get!

So I'm sitting there fuming...and everyone is clapping for freedom to worship that was protected by a guy who has been long dead being written letters from a growing daughter who hasn't learned to let go, let the dead sleep in peace, and move on with her life?

I'm sorry, but this memorial day, for the first time, will not be punctuated by my traditional "thank you" to the vets because I'm replacing it with this thank you.

Thank you to all you vets who went into the den of the beast, saw it for what it truly, fucking is, and said, "fuck this!" and brought the message home to the rest of us that war has an appetite for stupid people.

Perhaps that will awaken our fellow citizens that the greatest threat to the freedoms they enjoy doesn't come from across the sea, but from their own brazen fear of loosing freedoms that they never really cherished to begin with.

And if Sunday, yesterday, taught me anything it is that Christians are leading the nation in the direction of being gutless cowards...willing to cashier anything and everything for some mythical security that we, of all people, should know doesn't come from man.

G-d, we can be so pathetically sad.

Were you born in a barn?

Janus was the god of doors.

Janus also had a temple at Rome with double doors called the gates of war. The temple doors were open in time of war, but closed in peace.

Supposedly the doors were closed five times from the late Republic to the middle 5th Century AD.

The United States has never been a particularly peaceful nation, either. We have sent our people out to kill and die for us in foreign lands since we tried to invade Canada during the Revolution. As we are now. And with our wars just as with our dead, we do little introspection, or rumination, about the whys, the hows, the what-now, and the what-comes-after.

We're perfectly happy to pass by the open doors of the Temple of Janus.

Every year on Memorial Day I post this. But this year I'm tired of repeating what most of us here know and what most of those around us neither know nor care. Instead I humbly suggest that we let the dead bury their dead. And think of the living, and the decisions we make for them and to them.

For through those open doors will walk the dead men we'll "honor" on the next last Monday in May, and left outside those doors will be the living bereft, to whom they will never return, and as jim reminds me, those who DID return in body but can never truly return to who they were. In that sense, the dead have perhaps the least painful fate of all...Whenever I used to walk past the open door my father would bark at me "Close the damn door! Were you born in a barn?"

My father would know what to do about the Temple of Janus.

(Full post at GFT)

In Flanders Fields...

...the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Just a reminder that, while it may well be my most disliked "holiday", the poppies the VFW vets sell do go to help those who, unlike the dead, have not yet seen an end to war.

And that my little girl is the cutest thing ever. Wears her poppy well, don't you think?

(Crossposted from GFT)