We Invite You To Stand

I think I already feel guilty enough. It's a non-negotiable default setting for those of us who are blessed with generalized anxiety. Sure, it's more of a worry about things and an inability to recontextualize events and thoughts with the comfort of proper perspective and weight than anything as specific and event-based as actual guilt would be. But man, fire up that anxiety and throw some real guilt on top of it and you've turbocharged your afternoon (or several consecutive afternoons if you've really managed to hit the cataonia jackpot) of paralysis by terminal fret. You've got burning thoughts squealing out powderized-rubber donuts in the crowded parking lot of your psyche.

I don't really have a lot of guilt when it comes to my children. I know it's a major source for a lot of parents, but really what they're talking about it a discomfort with the frustration of having to choose subsistence over child-rearing or, probably more commonly, feeling relieved in that exact same set of circumstances. Sure, we love our kids and we'd love to spend more time with them, but... all of our time? They're precious, fine, and we miss so much while we struggle to provide, but would we rather be working toward a challenging team-based goal with measurable results with other adults in exchange for money we can spend on all the chicken fingers and Pop Rocks we can stomach, or do we want to sit through a Paw Patrol marathon and try to figure out why your otherwise lovely home feels so vaguely, naggingly disappointing? Nope, you'd be home, but there's a reason Paw Patrol exists in the first place: you need to keep the little parasites engaged elsewhere so you can have a goddamned second not worrying about them. At work, you get that all the time!

I say this with the deepest of love and the starkest of stark practical experience, having been a stay-at-home parent for 8-9 years at the beginning of my children's lives. Couple that with the fact that, aside from some rage issues well within acceptable range for the testosterone-based life form that is the modern teenaged male and (newly discovered by me, VERY recently) an uncomfortable ease and readiness to refer to other dudes as "cunts" in video game chat lobbies, my kids are genuinely decent and focused young adults. I've gotten to skip out on the offspring-based guilt almost entirely. I even see my ex wife, who worked extraordinarily hard to better herself and progress at her chosen profession while I changed diapers and learned the Rolie Polie Olie theme song, tear at herself for what she missed out on, being forced to rely on the cold comfort of earning somewhere between 15 and 20 times what I can make. I guess I could resent her more, but somebody's gotta put these animals through college.

I'm definitely capable of guilt, but I'm lucky that I lack a singular, constant source for it. I've been exploring this somewhat with a lovely old friend I've recently become reacquainted with, in a series of fairly focused and frank discussions, the kind you can only have with someone else in their mid-40s when neither of you is trying to figure out how to get the other into bed. I could have some guilt about this particular blog being my main outlet for my ability as a writer, but even that, eh, I don't mind it, I don't think, at least not at the moment. The non-existent pay is not spectacular, but at least I can say nothing I submit is ever rejected by the publisher. Unless Blogger crashes I guess.

I've got what I eat to worry about or how much water it takes to keep even my low-water plants alive in my front yard or why I can't stop buying straw-reliant beverages when we're losing hectares of ocean every second in the Great Straw War we're fighting against ourselves. And yet, even though facebook is objectively the fucking worst, I still find myself on it almost daily, including on days like Memorial Day. I don't know what your facebook feed is like, but mine is loaded down with white people. It's not a racial preference, it's just that most of the people I bother staying connected to on facebook are relatives, who overwhelmingly just happen to be overrepresented in the cracker department. What I'm saying is if we were any more honky, we'd be a traffic jam HEY NOOOoooowww....

On top of the MAGA-adjecent "why can't they just speak English?" or "I'm glad my parents beat me, I turned out great!" type of postings, every Memorial Day and Independence Day and Veterans Day and, even one time, Labor Day, I get this shit:



Look, I'm not stupid. I get what it's supposed to be saying. It's supposed to be saying that people used to do stuff back when when everything was black-and-white so that we can now enjoy the freedom to be sunburned and overweight in 4K Ultra-HD.

Or I guess it's possible they're saying that it's not enough to have a Memorial Day and to commemorate what it's designed to commemorate, it's that liberals hate America. Sure, I guess the message of this (and literally every other similar) meme is supposed to be a universal honoring the sacrifices, but the animating rhetoric isn't universal. There's a target audience. It's broadcasting outward from the poster, whomever he or she may be, the one who already knows to grovel and scrape and prostate themselves in an appropriately dehumanizing (but never quite undignified enough!) way before even the idea that someone else might have at some point joined a military. Because how dare you take the day off work. If you were a real patriot, you would spend the day finding a way to be shot at by a Nazi. I say that satirically, but I guess that's not as hard as it used to be anymore...

I blame Vietnam. Back then, people got mad about the abuse of the military in an unjustifiable invasion of another country and the attendant abuses and massacres attempted or achieved involuntarily in our name, where even the triumphs and impossible, unfathomable heroism was undermined by the political insupportability of the entire enterprise. Yep, the response at home was harsh and unyielding and unpleasant, exacerbated by a cultural moment of revolution and divide in the late 1960s/early 1970s. But if Nixon taught us anything, it was that even if you definitively ARE a crook and you get chased out of office, if you claim patriotism, in the long run, you're going to win the culture war. And slowly, quietly, that's exactly what's happened. Whatever strides we've made in gay rights and minority civil rights and women's equality in 40+ years since, one thing NOBODY IS ALLOWED TO DO at any point any more is question the military. Further, you do not even suggest that patriotism is something to suspect or interrogate, even a little, at the peril of public derision and/or your personal safety.

Not sure about that? Try leaving your hat on during a baseball game during the national anthem. Sure, people do it, but you can feel the hate coming off a huge percentage of the people around you. And every once in a while, you get to see someone volunteer to "remind" the offender what the fucking rules are, you fucking commie. My dad wasn't a postal clerk on a non-combat ship nowhere near the action in the same time frame as the a Vietnam War so you could go around leaving your hat on before a baseball game while some teenager fucks up the deeply mediocre song we're stuck with representing our country, asshole.

If you're not sure, here's what you do: you support the troops. Even if military service members are sexual assaulting one another at record rates. Even if military spending is laughably, unnecessarily, unsustainably out of control at the obvious expense of literally every other fiscal need, you just give them the nonsensical things they ask for. Because that's what "support the troops" means: no questions, no pushback, total surrender.

The alternative is to publicly not perform guilt and abject prostration. And that makes you A Problem. Or possibly a Mexican. Either way, we're working on ways to refer you to proper authorities. Disrespect is unthinkable, let alone intolerable. Before you get too comfortable though, you'd be smart just to keep in mind: we'll decide what constitutes disrespect.