Non nobis

The roads are really quiet this morning. This whole city has seemed a ghostly echo of itself for much of the weekend. I suspect a fair number of people are away or hiding in some sort of cool shadow. So when I took a brief trek down the road to get an iced coffee, I found something in that quiet to give me pause.

It was the sort of stillness I imagined before a battle. And, of course, the idea of battle is in my head because everyone feels the need to articulate something about the military this weekend on Facebook statuses.  I’ve said that isn’t my personal style. But I don’t mind remembering for a few seconds… or supposing I understand the remnants of someone else’s memory.

It is sticky hot today. The temperature isn’t really that high… but the moisture is stuck in the air… and made me think of what it must have been in the early of a morning in the South Pacific. Or Vietnam. Or… under a suit of armor in the Crusades (okay, that’s dry heat, but still uncomfortable). And then… I thought about the American South. I didn’t immediately think of the Civil War and battles in the summers of the early 1860’s. I thought of other soldiers a century later who went to those sultry states to make a stand for civil rights. To risk their lives in the country of the free and the brave to get one race of people an opportunity to vote.

I know that streamed into my head because as I was thinking of fighting in this weather at Iwo Jima or under an articulation of steel plates in Jerusalem, I asked myself, could I do it? And if you watch PBS, you might know that their recent documentary about the Freedom Riders had the tagline, could you do it?

So I think about those men and women and their sacrifice. And other freedom fighters throughout history – the suffragettes, the abolitionists, the nurses, the doctors, the settlers on the prairie, the colonists, the mill workers, the widows, the orphans… there is an infinite list of people who gave their lives either through dying or surviving to make this country what it is. Their degrees of sacrifice vary, but all towards the common desire of making the land where they live a better place to be.

So on a day that is called memorial, I will breathe in the humid May morning and think of them starting a day towards that journey that allows me to get into my Prius with an iced coffee and come back to skulk on the laptop and not have any further worries than how to keep cool on my day off from work.