Yesterday was Armed Forces Day, though you'd not have known it by reading most newspapers or news websites. Unlike almost every other national observance, it's not a big sales day at The Mall.
We have Veterans Day in November, and later this month we'll observe Memorial Day (with lots of meat cooked over hot rocks and a five-hundred-mile left-turn-only oval road race), but Armed Forces Day is for anyone/everyone who ever wore the colors, past, present, and (the way the world is going), future.
We have huge numbers of highly-trained and well-motivated young men and women, committed by my generation to military interventions around the world, whose successful outcomes I would pray for, if I prayed, though I cannot tell you what such outcomes would look like (the Stars and Stripes flying over the restored sculptures in the Bamiyan Valley? A Mets game in Mecca?).
The dangers in which we have placed our children and grandchildren have been guns and butter wars (and not quite wars to hear the President tell it), where real men and women suffer real losses while the rest of us watch our Chia pets grow on the kitchen windowsill.
In a half dozen or more locations around the globe, those in uniform have lost their lives in defense of the notions upon which we have built a nation. And for every one who died, close to a dozen have come home wounded either physically, psychologically, or spiritually (or all of the above).
And we haven't been as eager to bind up those wounds as we were when we sent those who sustained them into the fray. When we see a veteran missing a limb, we discreetly avert our eyes because saying 'thank you' or asking 'how can I help you' would be too embarrassing (for us, not the wounded warrior).
I know, that's what we have the Department of Veterans Affairs for, right? Just continue to compartmentalize the carnage and how we help the survivors-it'll help you sleep, and that's what's important these days, being comfortably numb.
-bill kenny
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