It’s been a heavy weekend of love mixed with sadness mixed with wonder and awe. It continues on this mournful Monday as a nation witnesses the pomp and circumstance that follows the death of a life-long servant of, from, and to the aristocracy of the United States.
I chose to wait to write today after taking a moment to go out to lunch in my neighborhood. I’ve been in a contemplative mood and decided to go without my usual phone and book to keep my company. The restaurant usually has some sport or event rolling by on the TV screen with teleprompter-type since they do not play the TV sound but rather sound from a themed musical background. This day, they played holiday tunes to the visual of the blue-and-white presidential jet landing at Andrews Air Force base in Maryland, carrying the surviving members of the Bush family and the coffin within which lay America’s patriarch, George Herbert Walker Bush. I teared up as I took a bite of my seared Tuna Tataki, not because I’m a big fan of the Bushes, but rather welling-up inside about the experience of difference in the treatment of one soldier over others. There is no doubt that George H.W. Bush served his country. As a conservative Republican, he served the Republican interests well.
What I find so appalling in the concept of “serving America” in any military capacity, is that so many thousands (maybe millions?) serve without acknowledgement. I had two older brothers who served in Vietnam, one in the Army, the other Navy. They returned home to a broken America, whose spirit for war and military empiring/conquering had soured to a point of brazen protest against the bloodshed spread to countries whose citizens were torn to shreds merely for the profit of the oligarchy. This, as it turns out, was the beginning of many failed American wars (both overt and covert). I’m purposefully leaving out the Korean War for which an armistice was signed along with a created “Korean Demilitarization Zone” and with no signed peace treaty. It’s hard to say how failed the Korean War as compared to the ones that followed. And yet, I have a nephew and a third cousin performing a tour of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan (still to this day).
On the account of the America-themed “heroes”– those were the ones who served in WWII as it pertained to assisting the Allied Powers to thwart a growing Nazi take-over while simultaneously halting a war brought to US shores by Japan on December 7th, 1941 in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. Since then, all other wars involving the U.S., and more importantly, started by the U.S. have not yielded the much ballyhoo-ed “hero,” but rather sad pawns who return home in a much different capacity than they began. Suffering years of PTSD, some with drug addiction, and others with various afflictions from their war wounds that are never fully treated by a dysfunctional VA, I see a land of broken could-be heroes and should-be heroes, if only…
So, I shed some tears today over
Brothers serving
Kings undeserving
Mothers swerving
Sisters unnerving…
