For me, this experience has drilled right down to reveal the rotten core of our ideas of work. This has been a depressing exercise, not merely because nobody wants to hire an old woman. I have been trying to find a job that is a bit more in keeping with my physical abilities in these aging days and that might utilize my skills and expertise. If this is all, we might not waste it so profligately.īecause we do waste our lives… on more than just war and tourism… We might rework our metaphors so that life is not a path through to something else, some nebulous after, but a being in this something, this tangible present. We might even look around us and see the rest of the living world and appreciate that it too is in its one given moment of existence. We might focus on life, on the here and now, on being. If we accepted this as our single, solitary chance to live, then we might do better at living. If there was no Valhalla, there would be far fewer young men willing to die for the preoccupations of old men. Just a day of flag waving and grilling meat and driving the clogged highways to generically honor “the fallen”. No honor in death… or in killing… Not even a whispered memory of your name. No paradise or hell or whatever on the other side of dying. There would, of course, be much less war, much less violence for the sake of “causes”, much less killing on behalf of others, if it was commonly accepted that this is the only life we get, if we accepted that there is nothing else. As most of you know, I have deep problems with this notion of an afterlife, but today it feels like the veritable root of all evil. And it really hasn’t relented since…Īll this got me thinking. It should be noted that Vermont hardly experienced COVID until late last summer when the tourists, desperate to get out of their stale apartments after years of quarantine, dispensed with masks and common sense and drove north in hoards. The NYTimes told its “Morning” newsletter readers to go to Vermont… which sent a frisson of panic through me at the thought of yet more New Yorkers, trailing their diseases, invading my home. And you grouse at your spouse and make sure your kids don’t drown or set themselves on fire and you drink quite a lot of beer. Then, you fire up the grill and roast dead birds and cows (or whatever is in hamburger and hot dogs). However, the main way to honor the dead in this country seems to be to pack your gas-guzzler with plastic paraphernalia and drive to some place that isn’t your home, preferably one adjacent to water.
I sold hundreds of baskets of grave flowers all summer long last year, as long as there were flowers blooming… Rather it may be a symptom of our plague era when there are more graves to garland and fewer ways to say goodbye to our dead. Recently, there has been a revival of grave decorating, but this doesn’t seem to be tied specifically to veterans. Rarely do we do anything to alleviate the suffering of actual veterans who served and did not have the good sense to die for the cause. Sometimes we make the effort to parade around a few wizened tokens of military service. There are flags and fireworks and parades, the usual expressions of pomp and patriotism. The core of the celebration is honoring the dead, but the mechanics of the celebration don’t seem to relate well to that theme. From talking with my military friends and relatives, it would appear that not even those who swear oaths and take up weapons believe that they are fighting to protect anything but the bloated wealth of a very few people. Usually “for this country” is tacked on to end of the observation, but I don’t think any of us believe that anymore. Ostensibly, the day is to honor veterans who died. My country celebrated Memorial Day last holiday weekend.
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