Thinking about Memorial Day

I love paradoxes.  I’m not crazy about contradictions.  Memorial Day–as it’s currently observed and celebrated, is a contradiction.  Its name and history suggest that the day is about remembering members of the military who died in the service of their country.  In practice, it’s a festival that marks the beginning of summer.

When I was growing up, my family didn’t believe in voting, let alone military service.  My grandfather was a conscientious objector during World War II, and he served as a civilian ambulance driver at home during the war.  My father didn’t get drafted during Vietnam.  As a child, my only contact with the military was driving occasionally past the Fort Dix exit on the Jersey Turnpike.

It’s a whole different ballgame living here in Alaska while the U.S. fights two wars.   When we lived in Eagle River, many of our neighbors worked at either Elmendorf Air Force Base or Fort Richardson.  Most businesses in the area offer some sort of military discount–even McDonald’s.  On the drive home from Anchorage, it was not uncommon to see fighter jets chasing each other across the sky, or to feel like ducking as a huge C-17 skimmed the highway, on its way to landing at Elmendorf.

As the saying goes, familiarity breeds contempt.  It’s hard to maintain respect for the military when you’ve watched someone in uniform kick the crap out of the garage door in your apartment building (true story).  Or when it feels like 95% of the pick-up trucks that tailgate you or cut you off on the highway are fueled by testosterone and driven by, you guessed it, people in uniform.

Members of the military are my neighbors, but they’re not my friends.  I know them well enough to know their flaws, but not well enough to love them despite their flaws.  And because of that, it’s easy to be cynical.

It’s easy to believe that military service has become a taxpayer-funded internship program for people looking for lucrative post-service careers as contractors.

It’s easy to say, “Yeah, right,” when you hear clichés about sacrifice for our country, and the defense of freedom.  Particularly when you feel like one of the two wars we’re fighting was based on a lie, and the other started as vengeance and has long-since forgotten its purpose.

But like I said, service members are my neighbors, not my friends.  I don’t know their hearts.  I don’t know if they struggle to live up to their best intentions.  I only know their sometimes-very-public brokenness.

Last Saturday night my partner and I watched the movie Brothers.  A harrowing tale of a Marine’s shattered psyche after being held hostage in Afghanistan, it ends with the quote, “Only the dead see the end of war.”

It seems to me that Memorial Day, this mixed-up contradiction of a holiday, only ensures that there are more dead.  We begin the day with politicians laying wreaths and spouting platitudes about honor, glory and sacrifice–and then we head off to our picnics and barbecues.  The weather is usually beautiful.

War is a terrible thing.  The people who sign up to “serve their country” and “preserve our freedom” are a complicated mix of motivations, just like the rest of us.  And when we send them off to war, they come home broken–or they don’t come home at all.

I’m not a pacifist.  Some wars make sense to me.  Defeating Nazi Germany.  Preserving the union and freeing the slaves (yes, I know it was in that order).  Fighting for self-determination (even if the more-perfect union we created was far from perfect).

But war should be rare, and if we want to ensure its rarity, we have to tell the truth about war.  War is hell, not glory.  And it’s certainly not a picnic.

The President’s Memorial Day speech got rained out today.  It seems appropriate to me that he huddled under an umbrella, speaking only long enough to warn them of the dangers of lightning, and to encourage them to take cover.

BAWAKE

For the past several weeks we have been trying to find a rental cabin on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.  It shouldn’t have been difficult.  Cabin rentals in the area are big business.

We wanted a pool table.  We wanted a mountain view.  We wanted peace and quiet.

Getting what we wanted was easy.

Getting what we needed–accessibility–required a lot more effort.

Life in a wheelchair, or living with someone who uses a wheelchair, teaches you to pay attention to detail, not because you want to, or because attentiveness comes easily, but because it’s necessary.

How many stairs into the cabin?

Is the bathroom door at least 26 inches wide?  Are there any other important doors or routes through the cabin narrower than 26 inches?

Is the toilet tucked away in its own little closet, behind a probably-too-narrow door?

Is there enough clearance on all four sides of the pool table?

We looked at photos.  We checked out floor plans.  We talked to the reservations agents–four or five times.

Yesterday morning we finalized our cabin reservation, then headed into Anchorage for the afternoon.

One of our stops was the ATM at the credit union.  As I stood in line, waiting my turn, a car careened into the parking lot, its driver clearly in a hurry.  He parked on the stripes between two accessible parking spots, completely blocking the only curb cut between the parking lot and the door of the credit union.  He was clearly oblivious, and perhaps he didn’t care.

Sometimes you get tired of educating oblivious “able-bodied” people.  Sometimes anxiety about conflict wins out over anger about narrow, self-focused vision.  I didn’t say anything.

We pulled out of the parking lot, moving on to our next stop.

A few minutes later, my partner said, “I like that license plate.  It says, ‘Be awake.’  Wouldn’t it be nice if people actually were?”

I Am Not Invisible

Yesterday afternoon our dog Brady and I went on a short “taking care of business” walk.  Brady decided that the perfect pooping spot was right outside the building.  As I straightened from scooping the poop, a red, full-size pickup stopped next to us. A young guy (30s-40s) got out of the truck.

“Hi,” I said, poop-bag in hand.

“Hi,” he said.  ”I just wanted to say that I’ve lived here for three years, and no one picks up their dog’s poop.  But you do, every time.  Thank you.”

You could have blown me over with a feather.  It was a deeply meaningful experience of neighborliness.

Sometimes when you try to do what you think is the right thing, day in and day out, especially something as humbling as picking up after your dog, you feel like no one notices.   You wonder why you bother.

Then someone sees you.  And thanks you.

And it makes you want to keep on keeping on.