I’ve thought about Memorial Day this year, and what it usually is: a time for flag waving and troop honoring and over-the-top patriotism for America. But that thought just sickens me. America is broken. It is full of hurt and sadness and evil from a very particular, and thankfully very small, but yet strong, minority. I cannot, in good conscience, praise the troops who fight in wars I do not support with weapons I do not think should exist, when many are dying on my own front door step.
So today I offer a verse in memoriam for those who have died recently in Uvalde and in every mass shooting in my lifetime, which is way more than I care to count. It is a small token I grant, but it is the best I can do right now.
This Memorial Day
Instead of honoring soldiers
Or cops who can’t police
Themselves, much less others,
I’m grieving insurmountable loss
Not just the loss of innocents
Children parents elders - everyone
Who falls to build another up -
Not a person but an ideal:
“A good man with a gun”
(Such a fucking filthy lie!)
But I forgot, it’s rocks and sin
That murders, not guns and men.
As if rocks could be bothered
Under the metal hail, casing
Each school and supermarket and
Synagogue and - everywhere where
Bullets fly in the face of innocence.
But if it’s sin, then repent of the evil
Of banning abortion, but not guns,
Of decrying politics, but not NRA funds
Of feigning helplessness, but ignoring a world
Where this hasn’t happened in decades
Or has America cornered the market on sin?
But if it’s sin, then repent of the evil in your heart
The evil that loves guns, killers or not.
The evil that won’t vote, to end to stop to halt
The sale of one more AR-15, the failure
To well regulate one more non-existent
Militia. We have a military now, standing still,
To defend us from all threats foreign -
But not domestic. Good guys with guns -
(That filthy fucking lie!)
Stand outside the door debating going home
While the children within will never
Go again. But tell me again how removing one gun
Wouldn’t have made any difference
to the ripped apart
So love your gun, your freedom, your self,
(For what is love but grief persevering?)
So persevere with your righteousness
While others mourn their dead
This Memorial Day.
Guns are absolutely a problem, and while yes, guns cannot do anything without a human agent to set them off, they sure do make it much, much easier. The overwhelming evidence shows that good people with guns have not stopped a single school shooting, and have failed so many other places. Police are almost useless in these cases as well. I am 100% for banning and taking guns away. They are tools of war, weapons of death, and have no place in civilian life. We, as a nation, have simply shown we lack the morality, the maturity, and the mastery to handle them responsibly and they should be taken away, as you would take a stick from a bully child who is hurting other children.
It bewilders me that some will vote for bans on abortion, or books, or whatever else, but not think for a second that banning guns will do anything to mitigate our murder problem. It has, and would again. I amazes me that we fetishize the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution of the United (hardly) States of America, and the Constitution itself as infallible, unchangeable doctrines. Who ever said that the founders got everything right, for all time? Who ever said they shouldn’t be improved upon?
Today, Memorial Day, or any day hence, I will not stand for an anthem, a pledge, or any sort of patriotic theater. That is still my right as an American. I won’t do it simply because the America represented by these displays is not an America I can support or that represents me. Unless and until that changes, I will take the metaphorical, and sometimes physical, knee. Our children are depending on us to change things and to keep them safe wherever they are or go. And right now, we are failing them so completely that it is unbearable.
We MUST do better.
a simple man 