Memorial Day

 

In memory of those who have served and lost their lives in the name of freedom, this grateful nation should never forget that sacrifice, nor support tyranny abroad, or support the rule of tyranny here. For those who would support and commend dictators from the land of the free or wish for a day-one dictator in this nation themselves, desecrate the sacrifices of the brave.

We Felt Our Mortality

 

We are a young country, the US, in some ways, and ride on the idea of our strength and sense of purpose as a leader among nations. The first country among equals (except we're not) as one might say "primus inter pares." The memorial logos, the sigils, the swag, often just show the World Trade Towers themselves, draped in flag-wrap. The buildings were not the tragedy--the loss of lives was.  We lost great people that day. We lost parents and children, leaders and caregivers, sinners and saints. All kinds of people. Office workers, police, firefighters, medics. 

But the pictures of the victims themselves is too haunting: and yet we see them, forever in our minds. And they get reposted on social media. 

We are losing them even today--people who inhaled too much of whatever makes buildings and are dying too young of what they breathed in. We are losing them even now, people who were there or their loved one was there and now it's 22 years out, and we lose people all the time. The narrative memory of what happened will fade. Except in what has been committed to print, video, etc.--but that memory is always a little short. 

Tragedies amortize. Tragedies fade. We said "Never again" but we don't step into the same river twice, or face the same sort of history as Memorex: just an echo. 

Veteran's Day--We Can Not Forget

This image I am using today is one I have used before for Memorial Day, because we have separate days for celebrating and remembering the lives of those who have served: the living and the dead. Veteran's day this year has coincided with the remembrance of the end of WW1, and this has also become connected with the drama of our current Commander in Chief, because he could not be arsed to memorialize our dead in Europe from WW1 or our dead who lay buried in Arlington. This tells me a lot about how Trump sees our veterans, through the lens of how he treats the passed. 

Our servicemembers are volunteers currently, and have chosen a period of their lives for which death or grave injury is a possibility, to serve the country that they love. Our servicemembers, our vets, have sometimes been new citizens, or people who served in the hope of becoming citizens. But they served with honor, because they did so for this nation.

Is Trump enough of a nationalist to know that people who never lived so long under our flag, nonetheless served for these colors, and bled for them? And should be recognized as every bit as American as my pale vintage WASPy humanity? 

Could he fathom their sacrifice, having in his own life sacrificed so little? 

We need to talk about his abdication from addressing our servicefolks, how he would not visit those who currently serve, and boldly assigns a posting for 5000 or more souls to a kind of Hadrian's invisible wall to mark a pale place between our border and the impoverished, distressed, and tired, poor, wretched refuse, yearning to be free, that even think to lawfully try for asylum here. 

I wish, my dead, delivered, and live, and thriving, my unsacrificed heroes of our so many wars, our veterans, that we had better representation for you, and us. 

I will not ever forget this man's disregard of you. 

The Survivor Tree

Sixteen years after the day, with violence and terror so much a part of our world, there is a hopeful and strong message in a living memorial, whose seedlings have been planted around the world.

Memorial Day 2017

Some gave all they had for an imperfect nation, for their love of their countrymen, for the ideals and values this nation stood for in their eyes, for a sense of profound duty, for the fellow service members fighting alongside of them. There are many reasons--but they are rooted in a sense of meaning greater than oneself. They performed an act of selfless honor. In their memory, it is fitting and correct to show honor not just to their sacrificed lives, but to acknowledge the greater civic community for which their sacrifice was made. We also can find our services to render to the greater good.

9/11 Happens Every Year

There's a good reason Bretagne is my lead-in to this post--she's a good old girl. She's 15, which is old in dog-years. She's the last known 9/11 service dog left.  In  her way, she's had a more intimate experience of the destruction that happened than a lot of people do--but it has literally been a dog's age.

Today a co-worker remarked "Did you know this is the 13th anniversary of 9/11?" and the question just seemed weird. Of course, the date is 9/11--was it that it's been thirteen years that seems odd? I didn't ask. It's just math, or aftermath. Babies born then are in middle school. We're still in Afghanistan. Bin Laden is dead.

For awhile, there were bumper stickers that said "Never forget" (still are on older cars), and I can't and I won't. But time does pass. I heard a speaker on some news show say that it is never over for the families of victims, and while it's undoubtedly true, I wonder if the event recedes--it seems like it should. There should be healing.

Bretagne sniffed out the bodies of the fallen, but became an inadvertent therapy dog as well to humans on-site. I don't know how dogs understand things, or what memories she has. But there's something to be said for understanding that that intimate scent of death is in Bretagne's past. And ours. But the therapy goes on. For all of us.

We are still, in some ways, a nation in recovery from a terrible shock, and the actions that have taken place since are many, and the world is a little different for those of us old enough to comprehend a genuine sense of "before" and "after". We are still at war with terror, even if we don't call it a war on terror. In a way, this war is picking at an old wound.

I don't think our wariness is wrong. It only needs to be informed and right. I don't think the lingering trauma is wrong--everyone heals at their own pace. But I think the day comes that the focus needs to be on healing, service, and fixing the broken parts of our past so suddenly disrupted on that beautiful late-summer morning.

And it may happen even on some late-summer beautiful day that someone remembers--isn't it 9/11? as if they almost forgot. I think that day has to come. It may take more than a dog's age, but it will come. And it will then be normal.  And it won't be so bad, even, that it is.

Memorial Day

For those who served under imperfect conditions, who served an imperfect nation, who experienced imperfect freedoms but considered the promise of this country and the potential of a more perfect and free life for our nation worth paying their lives for, the only reasonable pledge is to continue building a more-perfect union, and to honor the service and uphold the promises made to those who yet live, and also served. Words don't do a whole lot--they mark memorials adequately and sometimes comfort. In the memory of those who gave all, though, words are best consecrated to a promise not to waste life and to always remember what has been lost and can not be returned. And to honor the living for the sake of the fallen, to appreciate what their sacrifice was for.

Transgender Day of Remembrance-2013

The 15th Annual Transgender Day of Remembrance is observed because the lives of actual people are brutally taken away by violence because they dare to be who they are.

I observe this day because I remain appalled by any society that considers itself civilized, but can not or will not refrain from actions that are bullying and derogatory towards anyone on the basis of their gender identification, from the outrageous acts of violence including beatings, torture and murder--to the casual use of derogatory language to define those who must struggle to define themselves in world where a gendered perception is imposed on individuals without respects to human choice.

The right to live, work, marry (or refrain from marriage), be called by one's preferred name and pronouns, to come and go unmolested, to not be challenged over one's identity in public places--the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, in other words, should not be abridged by bigotry and hatred. And yet everywhere, they are. It is necessary for injustice to be recognized so that it can be addressed, and this day serves as one reminder to speak out for those who can--because of those who were silenced.

I Don't Think We'll Ever Really Understand

This makes for difficult reading.

Some were heroes that day.

But there were just so many children among the victims.

It is shocking that there could have been just another such tragedy that day.

Sometimes I wonder just what the hell is wrong with the world.

For Veterans' Day, I want to Point out some Good Causes:

I'm a true believer in the assistance that service animals can bring to our lives, so I think an organization like Patriot Paws is really worthy.

Also, I want to point out that for those who don't have much to give but still want to honor the service and sacrifices of our veterans, there is The Veterans' Site via the Greater Good Network. As this grim graphic from Moveon.org shows, there are definitely some shortcomings with respects to how we fully welcome vets back home. We can absolutely do better by people who have done so much for their country.

I definitely critique our government with respect to how it engages in war and the reasons we fight--but I still believe we owe those who have put their lives on the line for our democracy a lot of respect and material support.

Always Never Forgetting

One of the problems with marking anniversaries is that while events never really change in your memories of them, your understanding of them changes over time. With something like the events of 9/11/2001, the enormity of the events gets snowed under, in some ways, by the accumulation of things discovered and the traditions of pious language that inhibit our understanding of what took place. In the midst of a terrible tragedy, people used those events politically, and then sloughed off every criticism as political. Even saying it feels a little transgressive.

Big Bad Bald Bastard made a very righteous post about it at Rumproast. The events of 9/11 effected a lot of people's lives, but didn't "change everything". The deaths of thousands was used to justify bad foreign policy and may very well have been the result of negligence (mind me, I am not a Truther, but I agree they had a lot of the "dots" and didn't connect them) or incompetence. People trusted authority because when shit hits the fan, people come together for support. We want to do the right things and make things better--and those impulses got played.

Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Guiliani and others all basically shared in a collective series of fuck-ups that have to be acknowledged to be learned from. If we don't acknowledge them--we run the risk of some other, future administration of businessmen and bean-counters without sufficient foreign policy experience or appreciation for expertise, ignoring red flags because they don't value facts, and making "tough-sounding" decisions because they aren't really clear on what toughness is:

Toughness was people reaching out to their loved ones even in the midst of life and death struggles to offer messages of love and comfort.

Toughness was first responders pushing their way into danger in the hopes of saving lives.

Toughness was people facing over and over again the scenes of carnage and wreckage in the hopes of finding someone to save.

Toughness was what survivors needed--even when surrounded by loss.

Paranoia, security overkill, combativeness and resolute plans to go to war with the wrong people were never toughness. They were fake-tough. Those decisions were defended and covered in an aura of sanctity because of a ground both desecrated and hallowed, because of lives lost and questions that couldn't be adequately answered, and so were rebuffed with bravado.

We forget too much if we forget that part, too.

"The time is always right to do what is right," Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom."

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness."

"He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it."

"One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law."

So many lessons in how to be human, from a man who had too few years on this planet.

Elizabeth Edwards, 1949-2010

This just seems so terribly sudden after the news that she was ending treatment after her doctors advised her that there was nothing more to be done. There was something very genuine, very tough, very bright about Elizabeth Edwards that I really admired. She simply met adversity with honesty and clarity, and never left off caring about other people.

I will end where this fairly good obit does, with her own words from her Facebook page:

"The days of our lives, for all of us, are numbered," Edwards wrote on her Facebook page Monday. "We know that. And yes, there are certainly times when we aren't able to muster as much strength and patience as we would like. It's called being human.

"But I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that, I am grateful."

It's almost cliche to say someone "fought the good fight". So much so, that it's really moving when you know of someone that truly did. My thoughts are with her family and friends.