If you are like us, you have spent a bit more (or a lot more) time on social media since early March. You've sampled, and maybe contributed to, the discourse and sometimes the discord. People are (insert your invective here), government is (insert totalitarian slur of choice here) and things will never be the same because we are (be the futurist here). Fair enough. We've had our share of pity parties, too.
We've also had our share of triumphs. As spring has taken hold, we've set up chairs on the front lawn along our property line, poured ourselves a little restorative and, maintaining the appropriate social distance visited with our great neighbors next door. The sessions go on so long we've begun ordering appetizers. Others from our little burb walk by, enjoying the fresh air. We've met people who've lived half a block away for years, simply by being on the front lawn, not the enclosed back porch.
We've read great books, taken the dogs for walks. We've determined that, in fact, we actually have married our best friend. We've cooked some great recipes, thrown together some imaginative "Q-rats" and ordered out using a door-delivery bulls eye (it's as effective AF) designed by our daughter, who owns a crafting business. We've engaged in the great debate of the year, maybe of the 21st Century - was all of this necessary, or proper? And, we're watching Americans demonstrating the usual tenacity, imagination and grit. Amid the great cacophony of competing voices and interests, we're reemerging as the nation we've always been - three hundred million opinionated, clamorous, divergent, freedom-loving people trying to make all of this work.
It was bought and paid for by American men and women who are buried in cemeteries all over the world. They are in lavish, tenderly cared-for fields. In unmarked, hastily-dug graves. They were wrapped in canvas, tendered to the depths thousands of miles out to sea. They departed in boats, ships, airplanes - and were never seen again. They fought, and they died knowing they had been deprived of their own future, so that we could have ours.
My father didn't talk much about his experience as a Marine. Oh, he was proud as hell of his service. He told wonderful stories of peripheral times - the laughter, the camaraderie. It's just that, at the end, he would remember that the guys with whom he'd shared drinks, brawls and bawdy times had been killed on this remote Pacific island, or that...
I was a Lieutenant (jg) in the US Naval Reserve when talk turned to Iwo Jima. The assault waves were bottled up on the beaches, men lying in heaps in the black, volcanic sands, trying to find cover from machine gun fire raking the landing areas. "You'd hear this boom from the direction of Suribachi," my dad said, referring to the extinct volcanic peak that was a fortress of artillery pieces. "There'd be an explosion and a bunch of kids would get killed." I asked how long that went on. "All day." He was eighteen years old on that day in February, 1945.
Those kids, and hundreds of thousands like them, are why we are free to determine how we emerge in 2020. It certainly isn't pretty, and we all have different opinions about what we're doing, and why we're doing it. We don't all agree, and may never agree. We've seen loss, and death, and misery.
We've also seen heroism in the most unlikely of places, from the most unlikely of people. Our president says optimistically that what we had built - what we saw devastated in an effort to save lives - we can build again. This is the United States.
We are a free people. Because of the "kids" who fought and died all over the world. Remember them on Memorial Day.
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