On Kneeling …

Yesterday, I spent two hours with an AT&T tech, fixing an internet snafu at our Little Rock condo. On leaving, I discovered that he had served in the U.S. Army, with assignments in the Middle East, including Afghanistan. He didn’t learn his technical skills there. He served as a medic. My mind shot back to when I was waiting for the bus to take me to the air base at Da Nang to “leave country.”

Amidst the happy, talkative group waiting to go home, there was a young man in a wrinkled outfit with insignia stating that he was a Navy Corpsman. He didn’t talk, just stared through vacant eyes into space. I remember thinking how, after a year in a war zone, I couldn’t imagine what that man had experienced. That’s why I don’t respect people who swagger around with flag decals on their lapels and ask why I don’t wear one.

My oath of enlistment stated that I would “… support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I [would] bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” I’ve researched it numerous times, and I can’t find an exemption limiting that oath to people who look and believe like me.

After we boarded the plane, and it rose aboard the blue waters of the South China Sea, applause broke out. Among the celebrants was a sizable number of shipmates and comrades who, when arriving home would find themselves denied the opportunities and personal safety that I, a white man of Northern European descent, would enjoy. Some had fought their way through Hue, during the Tet Offensive. Some had defended Khe Sahn. Some had held dying friends in their arms. Some had served on riverboat patrols.

All had spent a year or more not knowing what breath they took might be their last.

Some had been called “boy” on the same day they had had suffered wounds on behalf of their country. Some would be stopped for “driving while black” on arrival in an ungrateful country. Some would be denied the opportunity to purchase a home, as I did, in a decent neighborhood. Some would be denied jobs because of the color of their skin.

Their oath of enlistment, which they had fulfilled with honor, was the same as mine.

I think about these things. In the famous line from the movie, they just wanted “their country to love them as much as they had loved it.”

 Kneel for the music, or stand for the music, it’s your right. I don’t give a damn one way or the other, and don’t expect me to. Flag decal or no, standing without having sacrificed will never make you as tall as a kneeling comrade who was shortchanged by the country he served.

On honoring honor …

Yesterday, a friend and I discussed the phenomenon that has accompanied death of Senator John McCain. It has been amazing, nearly causing a psychotic episode with at least one of his enemies. Overall, the outpouring of respect and admiration has been grandly comforting and reassuring. But why?

One can’t simply apply the usual explanations to this unusual situation.

We must, I think, avoid the temptation to under-symptomize our analysis, that is we shouldn’t seek one overlaying reason for the national outpouring of respect for John McCain’s life. It isn’t based on any uniform set of catalysts.

There are those who respected his military service but didn’t care for his political views.

There are those who scarcely know of his military service but resected his career as a senator.

There are those that believe he was following noxious orders when shot down but exhibited sublime heroism as a POW.

There are those who simply believe he was an orchid growing from a cesspool.

We could go on and on, and add greater complexity, but let me add a reason of my own to the mix.

First, I recall that someone once commented, I think it might have been Thomas Hobbes but I’m not sure and too lazy to research it, that “Our passions don’t change, just the objects of those passions.” Add to this my belief that our passions can either be good or evil “monsters of our Id.”

This reference to the film Forbidden Planet responds to my lifelong fascination with the science fiction films of my youth. In many, the Earth harbored subterranean monsters of cosmic threat and danger. Something (in the 1950s it was nuclear testing) unlocked these monsters, often mutations of insects or reptiles. The monsters rose to surface and threatened to destroy our way of life until some hero, often as not B-Actor John Agar, pronounced the ubiquitous phrase “It just might work.” He would then save us all from the monster-of-the-day.

In a social, but horrific, negative example, we witnessed, with the election of Barack Obama as president, such a seismic release of our national monster. We thought we were conquering the lingering rot of racial hatred. Alas, that monster only lay buried, awaiting a nuclear bomb-like explosion in the form of the election, to our highest office, of an African-American. In contrast to the movies, though, society was not united in defeating the monster and sending it back to the bowels of the earth.

No, evil people fed and nourished the monster. Worse, they set it upon their enemies and opponents, enlisting the services of a foreign enemy and the foreign owners of an influential television show. It worked. The monster grew and began consuming us. Would we survive? Where is our John Agar?

Perhaps we see hope. Can goodness lay buried in a subterranean tomb? Can some event loose it from its captivity? Can the better monster of our nature rise to fight the other?

Enter the phenomenon of John McCain’s death. Has it freed forgotten forms of decency and respect for honor that have lain buried for so many years? If so, how can we find ways to nourish it and make it grow? Can our salvation await us, birthed from the contemplation of this brave man’s life?

Perhaps it can if we realize that we are our own John Agars.