Things About Good People

I am not a Luke Bryan fan. Ima just get that out there right off the bat. But he's got this new song out and with some of the stuff that's been happening in my life lately, it fits the bill, and I can't avoid it.

I started a blog post about the things in my life that have been hard lately. I said goodbye to my old hound Trucker a few weeks ago. My kids are all growing up and facing Real Life struggles that I can't (and shouldn't) help bail them out of. My little pod of security that is my kids and dogs and small town life is unraveling in every direction, and the transition is hard. My life plays a little bit like a country song right now. But the bigger thing than all of that is the GOOD. The AMAZING things that have been happening. HUGE things and teeny things, but AWESOME things.

Because most people are good.

Some friends came and mowed my lawn, raking up piles of thick, wet grass with their bare hands after I asked just to borrow their lawnmower. They refused to let me help. Then a few days later, they showed up and dropped off a brand new lawnmower on my front porch. Not because I deserve it. Not because they're looking for credit... because they're good, kind people with big hearts in the middle of their own adversity. They're the kind of people I want to be.

Somebody else donated enough money to sponsor FIVE local Veterans to participate in the Catch 22 Memorial Day Shootout. I can't even tell you how big that is in my heart. For every business that I have marched in to, and every email I have sent, and phone call I have made (and I HATE talking on the phone) - this one donation made every step worth it. Because the donor (who asked to remain anonymous) is Good People. Like all of the local businesses who pitched in, big and small, to help out local vets. Good People.

I wrote about my friend awhile back, and her lifetime love that was slowly slipping away from her. An optimistic note from her and the love she has for him, in the hardest of hard times, give me faith that it's out there. Deep and abiding love. She's Good People.

When I am having a hard day, my kids, the ones I never give enough credit to, rally around me like my own little Secret Service Detail. Somehow even I raised some Good People. They're amazing.

I don't even have enough thank yous for all these Good People. But I love you all.

Things That Are Invisible

I learned in EMT class that explosion injuries happen in three phases. The first, initial, or primary impact is direct, impaled shrapnel, burned flesh - the most visible wounds. Then the secondary impact when the force of the blast moves a body physically and slams down or throws it traumatic distances across space. The tertiary, or third impact is the hardest to see, it’s on the inside, when the internal organs of the victim are slammed against each other and against the skeletal structure and damage occurs. These injuries can be the most dangerous because they aren’t readily visible or easily identified. Care providers can be distracted by a bleeding wound when a vital organ on the inside has ruptured and irreparable damage is happening quietly, out of sight.

My heart has been breaking over the last week after the news of the Las Vegas shooting broke. We’ve recently lost guys from the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan, and Green Berets in Niger, and people I care about are losing battles with their own demons. It makes me think about these tertiary wounds. My veteran friends who grapple with the invisible killer of PTSD are now joined by once care-free civilians who held loved ones in their arms as they died outside of the Mandalay Bay Casino. The long term damage that happened when those bullets impacted the victims of the Route 91 Harvest Festival shooting is something that most of us cannot comprehend. But some of us can. There were combat veterans in that crowd in Vegas, and we saw them.

We saw them loading bleeding victims into the backs of random pickups. We saw them lay their bodies across strangers to shield them from the shooter. We saw them plugging bullet holes with their bare hands with no thought for personal safety. It wasn’t just the combat vets that were heroes that day, but they were there. And they get the battle with the ghosts better than the rest of us. They get the rest-of-your-life impact of the bullet that didn’t hit you, but the 20 year old girl next to you. They get the survivor’s guilt. They get these things that people who have never enlisted also never expected to suffer. And now some of us, some regular people who lost loved ones, who witnessed the senseless loss, maybe some of us get them a little bit better too.

Country artists are singing about who lives and who dies and who chooses, a heart-cry that soldiers have sought answers to for generations. The cracking pop of a gunshot means something different to more than 20,000 people now - it means the same thing that it has to combat vets for a long time. It means the possibility of death, or even worse, the possibility of survival when someone else dies. It’s a reminder of the wife that you did CPR on while she lay bleeding on the warm Vegas pavement. It’s the nightmare when you can’t find the friend who was standing, running, screaming next to you, only moments ago, down a sidewalk on The Strip or a dirt road in Iraq.  

The battle that all of the victims of the Route 91 shooting face, more than 20,000 of them, is a real one. It’s just as real as the one our combat vets have been fighting for years, and now it’s hit a little closer to home. Las Vegas is a far cry from Afghanistan, and while most of these 20,000+ never signed up for combat, they’ve seen violence mow down the innocent indiscriminately.

It’s a good time to reach out to the vets and victims that are near us, and they are everywhere - it’s time to try to see the invisible wounds, the tertiary ones. It’s time to stop turning a blind eye or a deaf ear and it’s time to seek to understand the pain of watching destiny determined by a force of evil. It’s time to know that the hearts bleeding out invisibly are just as deadly as the shots that tore through that crowd, as vicious as the IEDs that rob of us our sons and daughters on a daily basis overseas. 22 vets a day prove this. Suicides spikes across every demographic scream it out.

Listen. Hold them. Be there. Look for the signs. As these events become more commonplace in our society, the population density of victims grow, and not just the ones who have been buried. They are all around us, next door, at school, at church, in an airplane seat. It’s a good time to start living with compassion for the people all around us, victims of domestic terror, gang violence, combat veterans, and the ones who have faced trauma that we will never hear about and can’t imagine. Trust me, they’re standing right in front of you. Just have eyes to see.

Veteran’s day is coming up. Don’t just thank them for their service. Acknowledge their loss, even as they live good, all-American lives next door to you. Accept their grief. Embrace their pain. Commit to their healing. It’s a good time to stop pretending that we don’t know how to help. It’s a good time to stop pretending it’s all good when it isn’t. We know how to be human, we know guilt, we know pain. We know joy and we can bring it back, but to bring light to the dark places we have to find them first. Find the bleeding hearts. Let’s start looking.

Things Worth Fighting For

The white flakes of ash float down all around me in the crisp November air. If I didn’t know better and if the smoke wasn’t thick in the backdrop of the landscape, I could almost imagine it is snow as it settles without melting on the headstones that chase up and down the steep hill next to Lone Oak Church. Tomorrow is veterans day, and the solitary grave marker of a soldier is in front of me with a flag being tossed carelessly to and fro by an undecided wind. The colors are right, but this is not the flag that I look for at a veteran’s headstone.

Another peculiarity strikes me as I read the numbers etched into the white marble: March 18, 1910. Adam Chariker was 81 when he died. Not a young man. And not a veteran of the great wars in memory… but then my slow yankee mind begins to compile the facts. These stars and bars are not Old Glory. They are the demonized symbol of an internal struggle so great that we still bear the scars more than 150 years later.

 

It strikes me as poignant, this banner of Civil War, placed reverently at the grave of a soldier, a veteran of combat in the defense of his country. A warrior for a cause he believed in deeply enough to fight and kill other men - his own countrymen. We awaken now in the hangover of an historic election that has divided our nation in a way that perhaps it hasn’t been in these 150 years. And this little rebel flag brings tears to my eyes to remember the thousands and thousands of men and women who have fought and died on both sides of causes that were sacred to them.


Tomorrow is Veteran’s Day. It shakes me to think that in all of my respect and reverence for those who have served it is easy to overlook the American Soldiers who fought one another, brother against brother, father against son, in the bloodiest battles that this land has been forced to drink up, believing uto their last breath in what they fought for. It’s easy to discount their service because depending on which side of the Mason/Dixon line you live on, it’s too uncomfortable to condone their fight. To call a confederate soldier a patriot is as unpopular as calling a law enforcement officer a hero. Racists, right?


The civil war was not about slavery any more than modern violent protests are about racism or mass shootings are about guns. There is a deeper underlying issue that may be just as unsuccessfully resolved by modern lawmakers as it was by the blue and the grey so long ago. The battle between north and south was about self government, external control, and the fine line between too much and not enough of both. As long as we are human we will fight this fight, and the only battleground where we will find victory is the landscape of our own minds and hearts.


I stand along the fireline here in North Carolina, shoulder to shoulder with veterans of more than one war. I stand next to conservatives and liberals, libertarians and pacifists. I work alongside Yankees who will endure grueling hours and physical labor to save the goat barn of the descendant of a confederate infantryman from burning up. This is the great America - the people who break a sweat every day to fight the very real enemies. The teachers who insist on a generation more well educated than their own. The “uneducated” voters who changed the oil in your car and grew the kale you bought at Costco. The scientists and lawyers who battle in trenches, bathed in a different gore, for our protection and our salvation from perverse humans and pervasive diseases. The doctors, backhoe operators, linemen and priests who refuse to proliferate conjecture of the condition of our nation from their couches, but with the work of their hands and minds and hearts they generate change.


It is not about making America Great Again, because that so-called “greatness” was borne on the backs of slaves, of minorities struggling first to survive, then to succeed. It’s about being the Great America that we have always intended, and continuing towards the ever elusive mark. We are perhaps now as great as we’ve ever been, as states pass laws calling assault of a police officer a “non-violent” felony and replace the rights of individuals with a higher minimum wage. The war against racism is far from over, as is the war against ignorance, greed, sloth and corruption. We owe our veterans at least our best efforts to maintain a nation worth their fight. A people worth their hope.


Our president is a representation of who we are as a people, the good, the bad, and the very, very ugly. We have cast off restraint after years of bowing to the strong arm of money and power and we now stand, naked and exposed, like the emperor in his new clothes. The real fight for American Liberty and virtue is not in Afghanistan or Aleppo, it is here in our own homes and on our own streets, and we have just run into battle with weapons that we have no idea how to control. But we can learn, and we must. And we can love, and we must.

Things About Remembering

For some people, Memorial Day is really about remembering - faces, names, events... Some of the people we know have looked the Monster of War in the face and lived to tell about it. For many of us, myself included, there isn't a direct memory I can connect to, a lost loved one, a first hand impact that changed my life forever. But then again, maybe there is...

How would my life look if almost 5 million American Troops hadn't deployed to the battlefields of France in World War I? What if more than 16 million US Soldiers hadn't shipped overseas for World War II? 5.7 million in The Korean War, nearly 9 million in Vietnam, and over 2 million in the first Gulf War. And still counting. Since 1775 we have lost over one million active duty soldiers. How can the death of 1 million US citizens not have impacted my life, or the life of any American, directly? Another 1.5 million of the nearly 42 million veterans that have served were wounded in battle.

Freedom isn't free. It comes at the high price of our best, brightest and strongest young men and more recently, women (144 female soldiers have been lost in recent conflict in the Middle East. In Vietnam as well as the first Gulf War, 6 female soldiers died). It is won on the backs and blood of a part of each generation - the ones dedicated to a cause, to service and to their country.

War is evil. There is no reason behind it. It is an insufferable plague on humanity much like any epidemic that cannot be avoided. It is dictated by greed and power and the most basic human depravity. This evil must be answered, and lives lost unjustly for a just cause.

Memorial Day was created in 1868 by the Grand Army of The Republic, a group of Union Veterans, after the Civil War. Originally called "Decoration Day" it was set aside to remember fallen soldiers and decorate soldiers graves with flowers. It was renamed Memorial Day in 1885 but not federally recognized until 1967. Memorial Day has become synonymous with a three day weekend, barbecues and beer. It is frequently confused (by yours truly in the past) with Veteran's Day in November, which is set aside to honor veterans of the Armed Forces, living and dead.

Some times, in the sunny end of May, as school schedules are circling the proverbial drain and the lawn is finally starting to look good, it's easy to forget that Memorial Day is more than mattress sales and flag flying. Remembering can be difficult on any day, but distracted by recreational demands and family reunions, forgetting becomes easy.

But Memorial Day is personal for every American. Whether your life was forever altered by a lost soldier, or you have lived an existence that is unconsciously reliant on the liberties that were hard won with human life, you have a reason to remember. The tragedy of every battlefield death lies in the havoc it wreaks at home, and the victims of these losses are around us and among us. Remember the fallen, remember the remaining. We owe our freedoms to the Lost Ones, and their families. Let's never forget that.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html