Thoughts on D-Day, America then, America now, courage, principle

Thursday 6/6/24

Today is the eightieth anniversary of D-Day. It's a day I think about throughout the year as I do 9/11. With the latter I think about people who went to work that morning and had plans for later in the day and that evening. People going about their lives. They got up, showered, dressed, took a route they'd taken perhaps thousands of times before, and a clock was counting down on their lives. They wouldn't ever be going home again. In a few hours, they might have been making a choice about jumping out of a building so they wouldn't have to burn to death.

I'll think about that at the start of a day and say to myself, "Okay, you can try hard today. Here is a day of life, make the most of of it." I have unique things I'm trying to get done during my time on earth. I don't want to waste the day, and I also think about how there is much we can't assume.

With D-Day I think about bravery and duty. Bravery and duty take all forms. In this life I find that people are virtually incapable of being brave in the smallest of ways. Simply doing the right thing. Thinking for themselves. Or, having thought for themselves, not making sure to make a secret of what they think.

When I was maybe five or six, I was reading a hockey magazine and the headline for an article was some play on D-Day. It was probably inappropriate--not sufficiently serious and respectful, given the events of that day. But you know how headlines make puns. It was D-Day in the Smythe Division playoffs or some such. I asked my father what this D-Day was, and I remember he didn't answer me. That was unusual. Now, he could have gotten distracted, or maybe he decided that then wasn't the time to go into this.

I'm by no means a jingoistic person. I'm not proud of this country. I wouldn't say I am a believer in what it represents as what it has become. It's where I live. But I don't extol it, I don't love it. I respect certain people. I look to respect certain people. And what they did or are doing or believe in and stand for. I think we're a long way as a country from what we were in the 1940s. We've gone down rather than up. We are a nation of social media-obsessed unthinking slugs. We shoot each other. We worship guns. We don't prioritize education. We would rather signal that we're some thing that has been deemed trendy than to be a person or people of substance. We reward the con. Race hustling. Mediocrity. Worse than mediocrity. We make so many things all about politics without having anything more than the laziest, most surface understanding of those politics. We are willingly letting machines take us over and replace our humanity. We're grifters. We're not our brother's and sister's keepers. We elevate playground games to a level of supreme importance in our society. We stuff our faces, we dump booze down our throats, we self-medicate up the ass rather than deal with anything, and we're encouraged to by various industries that make so much money off of people's weakness, cowardice, and stupidity that they might as well be printing it.

A country and its people are not linked to me. I will always look at the person and who they are as a person first and last. I don't care if you're an American, an Israeli, a Russian, a Chilean, a Brit. I care about the person you are. I won't do the color thing with you. The gender thing, the whatever-label thing. Just the person thing. I won't indulge anyone on anything else.

I think about those people who jumped out of those planes into the darkness, knowing that they may very well have never seen the light again--at least not in this world--and the men who came out of boats and ran up a beach into an unholy hail of bullets because of what they believed in. Who they wanted to protect. Who they loved. They did it for their family, their friends, strangers, and you know who they also did it for? People they didn't like. Because it was important that even those people had their freedoms.

That is principle. These people from all of these different backgrounds, colors, creeds. People from families with money, people from families without. Those with education, those lacking schooling. But I think in order to do what was done on D-Day, no matter who you were as a person in the rest of your life, you had to have principle in this aspect of it. Nor was it a small amount. And surely if those young men could do what they did regarding courage and principle, it seems like we should be able to do some kind of a version of that in our lives today.