I didn't know this until a week ago, but one of the questions that the "Ok Google" gizmo my phone will answer out loud is "Why are the flags at half mast right now?"
It pulls the answer from us.halfstaff.org, a thing I didn't know to exist but which I have sort of longed for. I always feel like a heel when the nation is honoring someone and I'm unclear on who that person is.
The thing that I DO like, and this doesn't speak well of me, is that I will sometimes shift the dedication of the lowered flag to some other person. Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles died five days apart. I sliced off a certain percentage of Reagan's observance and reallocated it.
"America the Beautiful". C'mon. That's justified.
Anyway, I feel like the net effect of things like us.halfstaff.org, the relentless feeds of unfiltered/social media and this new annual tradition of Facebook Picnic Shaming is that there's never been a point in history where Americans have been more appreciative of the sacrifice of fallen soldiers. I don't know if it's a post-9/11 thing, I don't know if there's just more open political discourse in which casualties of war are invoked as a weapon of debate, I don't know if it's just an illusion because I'm getting older and I'M thinking about it everyday with an increasingly focused realization of what a concrete thing death is compared to the trite and nebulous ideas that incite and sustain wars. I just don't know.
But it seems like one thing we could do to honor our fallen soldiers is to stop using them as constant justification of the least American thing that we do.
And before I get to exactly what that is, I want you to imagine your least favorite president (for almost all of you, it will be one of the last two) announcing during his second inaugural address (Twice! That maniac, whoever he is, won twice! What was America thinking?) that he would like the nation's school children to rise at the beginning of every day and state out loud that they intend to do what the government tells them to do.
That would be intolerable. Right? We see other nations doing this sort of thing and we call it "programming". And when some American questions the morality of the Pledge of Allegiance, although I'll grant you that it's usually some snotty kid bent on making a spectacle, the only offered defense is that soldiers have died for this country and you oughtn't question the motives of the people calling the shots.
But since we justify it with the sacrifice of people who died for our freedom, it invites the question: why don't we just uphold the memory of those people overtly? Why do we use the Pledge of Allegiance as a sort of double-rail trick shot to indirectly honor fallen heroes when the obvious thing to do is to regularly reaffirm their valor?
I'm sorry for all of that. I don't know why this is what I think about on Memorial Day. And it's pretty hypocritical for me to tell anyone how they should spend other people's honor.
My backyard is an unusually spectacular place to watch fireworks. We're a thousand feet from the launching area and our view is unobstructed. The first time I watched them from here was the first Fourth of July after the 9/11 attacks.
They didn't seem like fireworks that year. They seemed like artillery. They seemed like exploding airliners. They seemed like a dozen things I can only imagine because very young people were willing to put themselves between those actual things and me, a guy standing in his yard with his two year old daughter -- the smallest, most inconsequential thing a guy can do until that guy considers the enormous number of people who will never get to do it.
There's a place along my fence where I can stand and clearly recall that night, where I can still see my daughter's face lit with fire, jolt with the concussions pounding my chest and feel my eyes water with the thought of all the kids who had so little else yet to do but die.
It pulls the answer from us.halfstaff.org, a thing I didn't know to exist but which I have sort of longed for. I always feel like a heel when the nation is honoring someone and I'm unclear on who that person is.
The thing that I DO like, and this doesn't speak well of me, is that I will sometimes shift the dedication of the lowered flag to some other person. Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles died five days apart. I sliced off a certain percentage of Reagan's observance and reallocated it.
"America the Beautiful". C'mon. That's justified.
Anyway, I feel like the net effect of things like us.halfstaff.org, the relentless feeds of unfiltered/social media and this new annual tradition of Facebook Picnic Shaming is that there's never been a point in history where Americans have been more appreciative of the sacrifice of fallen soldiers. I don't know if it's a post-9/11 thing, I don't know if there's just more open political discourse in which casualties of war are invoked as a weapon of debate, I don't know if it's just an illusion because I'm getting older and I'M thinking about it everyday with an increasingly focused realization of what a concrete thing death is compared to the trite and nebulous ideas that incite and sustain wars. I just don't know.
But it seems like one thing we could do to honor our fallen soldiers is to stop using them as constant justification of the least American thing that we do.
And before I get to exactly what that is, I want you to imagine your least favorite president (for almost all of you, it will be one of the last two) announcing during his second inaugural address (Twice! That maniac, whoever he is, won twice! What was America thinking?) that he would like the nation's school children to rise at the beginning of every day and state out loud that they intend to do what the government tells them to do.
That would be intolerable. Right? We see other nations doing this sort of thing and we call it "programming". And when some American questions the morality of the Pledge of Allegiance, although I'll grant you that it's usually some snotty kid bent on making a spectacle, the only offered defense is that soldiers have died for this country and you oughtn't question the motives of the people calling the shots.
But since we justify it with the sacrifice of people who died for our freedom, it invites the question: why don't we just uphold the memory of those people overtly? Why do we use the Pledge of Allegiance as a sort of double-rail trick shot to indirectly honor fallen heroes when the obvious thing to do is to regularly reaffirm their valor?
I'm sorry for all of that. I don't know why this is what I think about on Memorial Day. And it's pretty hypocritical for me to tell anyone how they should spend other people's honor.
My backyard is an unusually spectacular place to watch fireworks. We're a thousand feet from the launching area and our view is unobstructed. The first time I watched them from here was the first Fourth of July after the 9/11 attacks.
They didn't seem like fireworks that year. They seemed like artillery. They seemed like exploding airliners. They seemed like a dozen things I can only imagine because very young people were willing to put themselves between those actual things and me, a guy standing in his yard with his two year old daughter -- the smallest, most inconsequential thing a guy can do until that guy considers the enormous number of people who will never get to do it.
There's a place along my fence where I can stand and clearly recall that night, where I can still see my daughter's face lit with fire, jolt with the concussions pounding my chest and feel my eyes water with the thought of all the kids who had so little else yet to do but die.
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