It's A Beautiful Thing

Today is November 11, 2015 and more specifically, Veteran’s Day.  Today we honor the men and women who have served in the armed forces.  I am absolutely getting my history geek on by scrolling the news feed of my Facebook page and seeing all the pictures people have posted of their relatives in uniform.  One coworker posted a picture of his father and mentioned, pretty casually I must say, that his dad escaped a Nazi POW camp.  What?!?!  How have we never talked about this?!  I want to know everything about it, right now!  Another coworker posted a shout out to his relative for serving in the Vietnam War and to the man’s wife for raising the kids while the grandfather was deployed.  Nicely, nicely done.

I drove to work and noticed all the flags flying today and thought of my neighbor who passed away a few years ago.  Bentley served in WWII and refused to talk about his service other than to say it was nothing.  I missed that he was not outside raising his flag and saluting it so very smartly today.  As old and fragile as he got, Bentley was ramrod straight and crisp when he saluted that flag.  It was a beautiful, beautiful thing and one that I am so very grateful I got a chance to witness.  I stopped at a red light and noticed the man on the corner had a sign declaring him to be a disabled vet so I rolled down my window and offered him some money.  He took it and thanked me and I thanked him for his service and he smiled a very toothless smile and walked on to the next car.  And then I leaky-eye cried; the kind I normally reserve for kids’ sports performances where I am so overcome with pride and emotion and nothing is sad, but dammit there I am crying again. 

As I think about it, I think it is because we are all, on our own way, kind of proud to be Americans today.  We are sharing our histories or our services and people are thanking and being thanked, and that is a damn beautiful thing.  How often are we proud to be American? How often do we even think about being proud of being American?  I think we are ambivalent about it most of the time and embarrassed about it the rest.  Next year is a presidential election year and as such, the absolute worst of America and its politics is what we are bombarded with.  I am tutoring kids in US History and one day will teach it, and America failed a lot of the time.  We killed, we conquered, we annihilated, we overpromised and under-delivered and continue to do so.  We continue to be racially divisive and sexually biased and discriminatory and if you don’t think so, you are a very white man with a college education and a good, good job.

However, today is not about the politicians or who is right or who is wrong. It is about the people of America.  Underneath all the bad you hear and find in America, the fact is that there are a ton of regular people doing good things every day.  Regular people raising their kids and thinking they are doing a terrible job.  There are people teaching kids or mentoring them and trying to get them to care.  People who volunteer to help, people who need the services the volunteers bring.  People who get up every day and just do what has to be done.  People who feed us, people who take our nasty trash away, and people who run our businesses.  Today, I feel reminded of all of that.  Today I feel like even though all we may hear about is the bad, that there is still an awfully lot of good and good people out there.  Today is about the dads and brothers and moms and aunts who believed in something bigger than themselves and who gave their time, their years and even their lives to serve it.  That is a beautiful thing, an amazing thing; a squeeze-your-heart and leaky-eye cry kind of thing.  Thank you veterans, for your service, and thank you also for reminding me that it is okay to have leaky-eye pride about the country you live in.