Fighting for democracy is messsy
It’s hard to imagine this is real now, but my town had a Memorial Day Parade every year. I played flute in the school band. We’d dress up in white (ick) and have one of those beauty pageant banners in red, white and blue across our chests and these cute little clip-on music holders and we’d play and march. Finiculi Finicula… Over There… a rotation of three or four songs over and over as we made our way through the town’s retail spine.
I wouldn’t call this town patriotic or even American in a lot of ways—it was primarily populated by first or second-generation immigrants. I have no idea how this tradition started or why it kept going. I don’t know how big the parade was because we didn’t get to watch it, since we were in it.
But I do remember getting up way too early on a school holiday and squeezing into white jeans (again ick) and a white shirt and getting down to the town’s main artery and even though it was May, it was kinda cold and waiting and waiting and then finally walking and walking and playing and walking and playing.
I knew Memorial Day was about soldiers. Dead soldiers. I don’t think I thought about it more than that.
I was an avid reader of Holocaust stories, morbidly avid. Stories about terrible soldiers and terrified people. Eventually I made my way to stories about liberation. Good soldiers. After WWII, the U.S. was mired in a series of murky wars that skewed sentiment. That ostracized veterans and paid little respect for the losses. I grew up inside this feeling: a distrust for wars, the military and the soldiers themselves, by association.
It took a long time to realize that soldiers did not get to choose their war. Intellectually, I knew this, but at a visceral level, I did not. I did not fully parse that those who were drafted, that those who were patriots, that those who joined to receive benefits after service, were nothing more than assets for foreign policy shapers. Their lives forfeit once they signed up. Like Mickey 17. Expendable.
There are threats to democracy and people have fought and died to protect the rights we hold.
Even when they were not given the whole story, they were fighting for their towns, their families, their country, and their democracy.
Even when they were blatantly lied to. Manipulated. Used. Discarded.
Even when their assumptions about the enemy or their own government were wrong, they were still fighting for sacred things. Else, why lay down your life in the struggle?
It might be hard to believe, but we are, most of us, fighting the same war. Activists. Artists. Soldiers. Activists and artists may have the privilege of choosing their battles. Soldiers generally do not.
I have learned to honor the ones who have fallen fighting for our ideas, ideals and way of life. Violence may not be my chosen path, but violence has won privileges for me and everyone I know. We are walking, breathing, eating the legacy of that violence. For better and for far worse.
So on this day, I am grateful to those who gave their lives for this democracy. And I double-down on what it means to protect it now, from the inside threats.
I look around and see unhoused veterans and veterans publicly suffering from PTSD, joblessness, severance from community and family and I think, if as a nation, we don’t protect them, nurture them, heal them, well, of course we will do nothing for those overseas being bombarded daily. If we don’t even protect the ones we claim to honor, of course we will turn a blind eye to everyone else who is suffering.
MEMORIA
There are other dead soldiers
Ones who have given up recently
after the longest struggles
Soldiers without generals
without orders
known only to themselves
following invisible paths
to greatness or obscurity
neither mind nor matter
they trudge on
vision only on the inside anyway
these soldiers
they know my name and yours
they wrote everyone’s name in a book
so that if they died
there would still be memory;
inscription conscripted to service
Art is a war, too.
As endless as the other
As unwinnable
the ugliness of beauty
on display for those willing to look
Today let’s honour the dead soldiers
who gave up all their years
to following unseen guides
who walked weaponless onto battlefields
to bring back the stories
who swam naked in gilded light
to teach us what shines inside
who sang their song
in the face of humiliation
They are soldiers too
Their war never ends
Their humanity never ebbs
Their compassion only grows
Their violence worn on the inside
like a pocket watch relentlessly
counting down the seconds
they have to get it right.
-E. Amato
Originally published in Will Travel, Zesty Pubs 2014.
May today’s new moon bring welcome changes. 🩵
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