Not To Stand, Not To Kneel
I write in the morning, seated at Starbucks, enveloped in the buzz of townspeople conversing around me. Most linger here for as long as it takes the barista to fill their drink order. Some like myself stay for a while. I recognize many and know some, the regulars. At the corner of State and 3rd, I’d like to imagine that the room in the repurposed older building is a 21st century counterpart to the public space of the 3rd century BC Athens, when Socrates lived. Today in the early 7AM hour, I could not find the mental traction to write anything. My mind was filled with indescribable feelings, incoherently ricocheting. I could not achieve enough perspective, the distance required in order to write, while thinking over and over, — the numbers 19 and 2. Nineteen children and two teachers were summarily killed by a eighteen year old male. Without doubt you know the details of the Wednesday massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Memorial Day is an anticipated day of celebration in the cycle of public holidays that lend social meaning to the rhythm of the four seasons. I live in the Midwest. Here we consider the Memorial Day weekend the beginning of the summer season, even if summer officially begins in June. Sometimes if circumstances permit, I will be present at the drag strip. I again renew my “membership” in the community dedicated to horsepower, and the asphalt quarter mile. I have felt particularly American when in proximity to race cars, with the men and women, connoisseurs of that way of life.
I do not expect to salute the flag on this Memorial day weekend. Patriotic emotion does not well up in the aftermath of 19 children killed — because anyone in Texas, can purchase all manner of military style weapons, tools with a design-purpose to kill humans efficiently. This is no demonstrable “god-given” right but one constructed by our ancestors who lived in the 18th century, a time when the country was largely wilderness. What is the sanity in unrestricted ownership in a civil society of any weapon designed to “stack up bodies”? It is as if many of us have contracted a virus, resistant to treatment, a condition locking our judgment into an infantile mode. Any serious suggestion that weapons have to be regulated in a complex 21st century society — is met with a firestorm of resistance.
What has happened to us? What has changed in my lifetime? We, at least some of us are possessed by a irrational fanaticism, stoked by anti-government paranoia, — that causes us to ignore the bodies piled up at Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, Columbine High School, and Uvalde Elementary. If you are on the other side of this issue I am compelled to ask:
What the fuck do you want ?
So I do not expect to stand up for the flag any time soon. Moreover, since the flag, a symbol of our country lately has been conflated with religious piety, the God N’ Country fever evoked by some concoctions of Christian worship,– I do not intend to kneel for the cross either.
