Move on up

He ain’t human, he ain’t kind. I can’t come up with the words to capture how indecent and amoral Trump is. And to think that many people support him.

Remembering my Uncle Leo who served in the Navy in WWII. Came home at war’s end and found work in the post office. He and his wife didn’t have children so he took a special interest in his younger sister’s three children, myself and my two brothers. And when she died at a young age, he, along with my elderly grandmother, helped to fill the terrible void in a devastated family and home. He has been gone for a long time now, but he still lives in our memory. We will never forget.

I post this on my blog every Memorial Day to remember my two friends who died in the Vietnam War. SW

Today, I will again lift a pint of ale in memory of my two friends and their comrades who died in Vietnam.

I honor them without honoring the aggressive and unjust war in which they fought.

I don’t know what their reasons were for joining the military, maybe it was simply that the draft gave them no choice, but it really doesn’t matter now. What I do know is that their lives were unnecessarily cut short.

As a young peace activist in the late 60s, I probably didn’t always make a distinction between the soldiers fighting the war and the war itself. The soldier and the general were equally responsible as I saw it.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

But I think differently now. I place the main responsibility for war on its architects in high places and a social system – capitalism – whose logic is to expand, dominate, and make war.

Ricky and Cotter — my two friends who lost their lives in Vietnam — were near the bottom of the food chain of war making, nothing but cannon fodder. They were working class kids whose lives didn’t count for much in our government’s war plans. Neither was born with a silver spoon in their mouths, which is why in no small measure they ended up with a gun in their hands so far away from where their hometowns.

I will always wonder what kind of lives they would have lived had they safely returned. With no hero’s welcome, no counseling waiting for them, no easy slide into a well paying job, I can’t help but if wonder if they would have had the internal resources and external support to come to terms with their war experience and live productive lives?

I easily (perhaps unfairly) doubt it, because each of them was not that different from me, and I have no confidence at all that I could have made that transition. It was hard enough to grow up at that time, even without the ghastly and up close bloodletting of Vietnam on my emotional resume.

I wish, though, that they had that chance. I wish that their lives hadn’t been cut short doing things that no one should do. I wish that they had the opportunity to live long and joyful lives.

I miss them. I celebrate them. They were “my buddies, my friends.” I wish they could join me at the Bronx Ale House today for a pint in their honor, although knowing them, I suspect, a single pint wouldn’t quite satisfy them, or me for that matter.

I also hope that we could toast to the millions in our generation who opposed the war as well as to their comrades who never made it back from Vietnam. Both deserve to be honored.

Finally, I like to think that the three of us could clink glasses to the people of Vietnam who suffered so much during and after the war, and who are now rebuilding their country in conditions of peace.

Maybe that would be too much to expect. Unfortunately, I will never know. They will join me only in memory this afternoon. I wish it were different, but I will treasure their memory anyway, as I wash down my pint of ale.

Like most everybody else, I’m hanging out and social distancing. The arrival of warm weather and its companion, a bright sunny day, helps the spirits as does cutting back on cable news where Trump is a constant presence. Still it is hard to shut him out entirely. He doesn’t let a day go by without saying or doing something that is stupid, dangerous, and evil.

It’s mind boggling that the deaths of nearly 100,000 people don’t seem to register with him. Not a bit. He’s indifferent. Empathy is absent. Comforting is something he doesn’t do. Even fake concern is nowhere it sight. What preoccupies him is his slipping polling numbers against Joe Biden. Nothing concentrates his mind and triggers wild conspiracy theories and bizarre behavior quite like they do. His latest invention in a long line is, no surprise, Obamagate.

Sorry Jerry, but he is “a long strange trip.”

All this would be more than enough to drag me down, if I let it. But I don’t. In no small measure because I see, sometimes up close, usually at a distance, so many acts of kindness, solidarity, and sacrifice from so many people. Some even giving their own lives as they help others. Deeply sad for sure, but noble and heroic too. It lifts my spirits, although if I could drink wine and/or beer without a hangover the next day, I could easily develop a drinking problem.

But I don’t, at least not every day. Instead, I keep busy in other ways. Write a little, exercise daily, rehabilitate my arm (I tore the tendon in my right arm and decided to do physical therapy instead of surgery; didn’t want to go into hospital in early April), read, including some books that I have been wanting to read for a long time, walk every morning, cook, clean (with a little urging), mow the grass (big yard), entertain my dog, and zoom weekly with family and friends. I’m sure I’m forgetting something. Ah, I did. It’s Netflix, and also I’m participating in a well coordinated voter registration and get out the vote campaign, using postcards.

Hope you are doing ok and staying safe too.