What do you love? - Democratic Underground

WilliamPitt

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Mon Sep-12-05 02:27 AM
Original message

What do you love?

(This text was originally posted on Memorial Day Weekend)

I love my mom. She had me when she was 26 and then watched her marriage fly apart for reasons I have no place to judge. She went to school with a young boy on her hip and became one of the best in her business, all the while with the whip-hand raised to make sure her son was worth the world he was to live in. She lives today, paintbrush in hand and canvas at the fore, at the end of five miles of dirt road in New Hampshire in a small log cabin by a lake. She is the strongest, smartest, wisest, funniest and best person I will ever know.

I love my dad. He was born out of red North Alabama clay to love FDR and the Tennessee Valley Authority, and met my mom just before he volunteered for Vietnam duty in 1969. Yes, volunteered. He watched his marriage fly apart for reasons I have no place to judge, and embarked upon a 40-year oddessy of public service that took him from the Secretary of State's office to the Attorney General's office to the US. Attorney's office - all in Alabama, where Democrats are awfully popular, you know - and only in the last couple of years did he figure out that you can actually make money as a lawyer in private practice. He is the strongest, smartest, wisest, funniest and best person I will ever know.

I love my city. Boston, cold, rainy, hot, sunny, bitter and snowy altogether, with a confluence of 400 years of history marking the cracked streets. We started slavery and ended it - the slave trade came from here, 'Boston Baked Beans' were slave food for generations, and yet The Liberator was printed here, the Union Clubs were started here, and the spine of Union strength during the Civil War was found here. Never mind the Guns of Ticonderoga and the lashing of the British. That's just the fun stuff. Boston is America: Every race, and every racism, dirty and clean together, a port city at once looking ahead and anchored to the past, with all the weather of the country pouring out along the jet stream and across the Cape. Don't like it? Wait five minutes. Oh, and the Sox. And the Pats.

I love my country. We made the slaves, and freed them. We slaughtered the natives, and carved out a space for millions of others to find freedom from their own lands, opressions, tortures. We stand for freedom and sell it out every day. We stand for profit, we exude the excess of victorious capitalism from every pore, we are governed by an avarice and a body-lust that has nothing to do with the soul or the spirit, and yet, with a million billion kindnesses done on streetcorners and church pews and protest rallies and God knows exactly where else, we show with every breath that profit and money and wealth are not a reason to breathe in and breathe out.

No propaganda can paint over the blood and horror and woe we have created. No propaganda can obscure the greatness of the ideal - Of the People, By the People, For the People - nor can any propaganda obscure the greatness of our accomplishments. We have done great things, and terrible things. We are guilty, and we are innocent. We have done great things, and boy o boy, we have a lot of cleaning up to do.

What do you love? What do you fight for?

Do you fight for an ideal, a promise at the end of your struggle? Or is the fight itself so much a habit now that you have forgotten what it is that got you started in the first place? Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I lose myself in the warring between party, between ideology, hell, sometimes in the warring within forums here.

But then I remember.

I'm an American. My family came over her on boats from Ireland, England and Germany. My family farmed, went to school, busted their humps to make sure their kids did better than they did. This is a lot of what we are missing these days, that idea of sacrifice, that immigrant ethic: You aren't in this for you, but for your kids, for the future.

Once we lost that, once instant gratification became the state religion, then easy gas and easy steel and easy labor and easy war and easy death became, well, easy, and we forgot that there is a price to be paid in the end.

Everyone is born owing a death. Every man, every woman, every nation, every empire. To think this escapable is to laugh in God's face, and God is not mocked.

I'm an American. I am proud of my nation and ashamed of it. I am proud of the ideals of our institutions of government, and ashamed at how easily they are corrupted by money, by that instant gratification desire which mouths platitudes of patriotism while spitting on the nation entire.

Somewhere in history, I'm pretty sure my family owned slaves. Somewhere in there, I know for a stone fact my family fought to free them. I'm an American, so I'm conflicted. That's how it is.

But I know we can do better than this. I know we will. I am a profound believer in what-goes-around-comes-around, with the caveat that nothing will come around without some shoulders to the wheel.

I love my mom, I love my dad, I love my country, and I hate it, too. I love the fact that I can sit here and say whatever the hell I want, trype it out and push a button and make my nonsense the fodder for hudreds or thousands or millions. That's freedom. That's raw democracy. But I wish I could say only good things about my country, my people, our history, or legacy. That would be nice.

What do you love? What do you fight for? What would you die for?

This is Memorial Day Weekend. Better men than I am or ever will be marched off to fight and die for the best ideals this nation has to offer. This weekend, millions of assholes will stuff themselves into cars and ram down Routh 3 to the Sagamore Bridge for a hoped-for weekend of sunshine on cold Cape Cod beaches. Why? Because they got an extra day off. Sure, they'll maybe get choked up during the ballgame when the extra-special 'God Bless America' gets sung, but hell, Normandy was more than 60 years ago, and sure, Dad fought in Vietnam though he doesn't like to talk about it, and sure, the sister-in-law of the neighbors who moved last year might have had a son who was supposed to get shipped off to Iraq...what was his name?

Do we even remember what we stand for anymore?

When was it that we were last a people governed by something besides ease, or the desire for ease; money, or the desire for money; fear, or the desire to kill what it is we fear? Have we ever been anything other than people motivated by base instincts? Of course. Can we be more than that? Of course.

What do you love? What do you fight for? What would you die for?

Those questions need to be asked and answered, and quickly.