This is the start of the Veterans Day Holiday weekend which to many, perhaps too many, signals a jump-start on Christmas shopping. Are we so comfortable with the idea of those who have served in our armed forces that we no longer actually "see" the men and women who wore, and still wear, uniforms in defense of a notion and a nation trying to make its way in dangerous times?
All the news in the last few days about body counts, wounded service members and the other horrors of war lead me to realize terrorists (ideologues of all stripes), are actually relentlessly logical. They see the world as "us vs. them" and behave and eradicate accordingly.
We, sentient humans everywhere, are facing off against lunatics who believe in a Divinity who wants them to smite their enemies or die trying. (I shudder to think that their idea of eternity is to spend ALL of it with a God who would do this to them. But that's just me, I hope.).
We do what we must do-continue to attempt to impose order on the universe even as the chaos slops out over the sides of the container, because we would not know what to do if we ever had the silence to hear our own hearts racing or our own emotions raging.
Visuals are powerful and our collective and communal memories of those visuals are more so. Our parents had to live with the black and white still photo of the Death of the Loyalist Soldier in the Spanish Civil War.
We have grown up with enough video horrors to last us three lifetimes:
we watched a President get his head blown off, more or less, in Zapruder's 8 mm silent movie; there was the on-camera execution of one Vietnamese by another with a pistol shot to the head (and the total absence of expression on the face of the about-to-be-shot) AND all of us saw a jumbo jet attempt to land on the 73rd floor of a World Trade Center tower....and the ensuing 'cut to the towers slowly, as if underwater, sliding into the ground picking up speed as they collapsed' street level camera with the cloud of dust driving a human stampede before it.
Few of us can stand to see EVER see any of 09-11-01 clips again, and yet I, for one, replay them in my memory as if trapped in a movie theater with a projectionist gone mad.
And we have raised kids who play video games, Grand Theft Auto is the usual whipping boy, where you get points for killing people. And then we scratch our heads and wonder 'how come law enforcement can't do more/something/anything about crimes of violence?'
What was it the Beatles sang, "I am he/As you are he/As you are me/And we are all together." Whether we like it or not. Six billion on the ant farm with beepers-each of us scratching and clawing for 'my share'. I'm afraid what you see is all you'll get. I can already see the "Here Comes Your Happy Ending" sign in bright lights and big, bold type, straight ahead.
-bill kenny
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