Memorial Day 2021

 

That flag flying beside a post office in San Francisco's poorest neighborhood is just about the definition of "tattered." It's condition seems appropriate to the condition of the republic.

 

That black banner underneath -- that's just another generation's version of the Big Lie. The fiction was convenient to another generation's Republicans to pretend that captives and missing-in-action soldiers had been left behind when the U.S. was driven out of Vietnam. There were no such prisoners. Who cared what torment that Big Lie caused the relatives of soldiers who were never coming home?  Hard to believe Post Offices still have to fly that Lie.

Margaret Renkl caught something for our time:

NASHVILLE — For the first 13 years of my life, my country was at war in Vietnam. ... I don’t remember how old I was when I first noticed the casualty counts that closed those broadcasts, but at some point it dawned on me that boys in America grow up and go to war, and some of them die there. American boys had been dying in Vietnam for my entire life, and I assumed they would always be dying there.

 

My father never went to war. ... Young men of my father’s generation grew up during wartime and generally expected to serve when their turn came. No generation since has felt the same way. There are compelling reasons for that shift — the protracted catastrophe in Vietnam not least — but I’m less interested in why it happened than in what it tells us about our country now. ...

 

... the coronavirus pandemic became a perfect illustration of James’s “moral equivalent of war.” We weren’t fighting a human enemy, but we were fighting for our lives even so. This national calamity, this invasion by a destructive and unstoppable force, was our chance to come together across every possible division. ... Plenty of Americans — essential workers, first-responders, hospital staff, teachers and many others — lost their lives because they made such sacrifices. Millions more complied unhesitatingly with measures designed to keep the most vulnerable among us safe. But too, too many of us did not. Too many were hostile to the very idea that they should alter their behavior even in the smallest way for the sake of strangers. ...

 

... If Vietnam exploded the unquestioned commitment to national service, the coronavirus pandemic should have been the very thing to bring it back. That it did exactly the opposite tells us something about who we are as human beings, and who we are as a nation. There is more to mourn today than I ever understood before.

I feel very lucky. The pandemic here in San Francisco did evoke civic solidarity; few cities enjoyed as much compliance with stay-at-home directives. 

As of today, 77 percent of us have received at least one vaccine shot. Over the duration of the health crisis since March 2020, 546 San Franciscans are recorded as dying from COVID. A disproportionate quantity of cases and deaths have been in the Latinx community. And very local Latinx-led community organizations have risen to the challenges, distributing food, offering COVID tests, and then organizing vaccinations. 

None of that is to say that city or state leadership was perfect, only that they weren't so bad that they stood in the way of solidarity offered by local leadership.

National leadership clearly was that bad. Now the GOPers have nothing left but their Big Lie -- and apparently aim to end flawed but aspirational democracy as we've known it. 

 

If the lives sacrificed defending that sad-sack flag mean anything, it means it's time for the majority of us to out vote and out organize Republican lies.