Death…

Alexandria, VA

Did you ever think when the hearse goes by that you might be the next to die?
The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out…

Kent State
Oklahoma City
Charlottesville

A kid’s song. A reminder, even for the very young, that death’s specter is ever present. And especially ever present at my age, but it’s just one of those things, I try not to pay attention.

For some reason, the way back machine circled back and found death memories today…for me, some deaths were puzzling, shocking, and a mystery, some were like a hard punch in the gut, others like a slap in the face. All had the pain of loss and empty space.

I remember the people I cared about. My memory ticked off the list and remembered each of them, but sadly not all their names. Too many. Way too many. Death changes those left behind.

My life changed after the Kent State Shootings, when young people were targeted and killed, people I didn’t know but they were students, exactly like me, expressing their deep commitment to a cause. And then someone else, again, just like me, a young military person…opened fire on those students, fellow Americans. A light went on in my head, this isn’t that different from Selma, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas. Americans shooting Americans because of fear and a failure to talk with one another.

We have a long history of crap like that and strong-arm politics in places like Florida is going to encourage even more fratricide. The Florida State governor’s personal, protection police force were deployed to Texas to detain Venezuelan asylum seekers and kidnap them to Martha’s Vineyard. That’s how the brown shirts started in Germany in the 1920s.

Fifty-eight thousand people from my generation are memorialized on the Vietnam Wall. Thousands more died from post-Vietnam illnesses. Hundreds died or were silenced in the Civil RIghts movement. I wonder what we would be like had they lived. I think we survivors have made our political process a circus-like sideshow…money buys votes, money buys judges even at the highest level, and we’re all armed.

The loss of those tens of thousands of young lives and their potential in the 1960s…more tragic than I ever imagined. Where would we be now had they lived?

Vietnam Memorial Wall