other, stories

Below this and the picture are some select parts of a post by Tom Engelhardt about memorial day. Scroll down and look at the list of towns. Those are the hometowns of the soldiers who’ve died this May while on duty in Afghanistan. There are twenty two towns, each recently struck by war’s curse: the death of a loved one. Year by year the wounds heal, but the scars are forever.

It’s Memorial Day and there’s a scarred town on my heart: Bellevue, Washington.

Thank you so much, Joe. We miss you  :’-(

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May is the official month of remembrance when it comes to our war dead, ending as it does on the long Memorial Day weekend when Americans typically take to the road and kill themselves and each other in far greater numbers than will die in Afghanistan.  It’s a weekend for which the police tend to predict rising fatalities and news reports tend to celebrate any declines in deaths on our roads and highways.

Quiz Americans and a surprising number undoubtedly won’t have thought about the “memorial” in Memorial Day at all — especially now that it’s largely a marker of the start of summer and an excuse for cookouts.

[…]

Count on one thing: there will be no Afghan version of Maya Lin, no Afghan Wall on the National Mall.  Unlike the Vietnam conflict, tens of thousands of books won’t be pouring out for decades to come arguing passionately about the conflict.  There may not even be a “who lost Afghanistan” debate in its aftermath.

Few Afghan veterans are likely to return from the war to infuse with new energy an antiwar movement that remains small indeed, nor will they worry about being “spit upon.”  There will be little controversy.  They — their traumas and their wounds — will, like so many bureaucratic notices, disappear into the American ether, leaving behind only an emptiness and misery, here and in Afghanistan, as perhaps befits a bankrupting, never-ending imperial war on the global frontiers.

[…]

Afghanistan has often enough been called “the graveyard of empires.”  Americans have made it a habit to whistle past that graveyard, looking the other way — a form of obliviousness much aided by the fact that the American war dead conveniently come from the less well known or forgotten places in our country.  They are so much easier to ignore thanks to that.

Except in their hometowns, how easy the war dead are to forget in an era when corporations go to war but Americans largely don’t.  So far, 1,980 American military personnel (and significant but largely unacknowledged numbers of private contractors) have died in Afghanistan, as have 1,028 NATO and allied troops, and (despite U.N. efforts to count them) unknown but staggering numbers of Afghans.

Spencerport, New York

Wichita, Kansas

Warren, Arkansas

West Chester, Ohio

Alameda, California

Charlotte, North Carolina

Stow, Ohio

Clarksville, Tennessee

Chico, California

Jeffersonville, Kentucky

Yuma, Arizona

Normangee, Texas

Round Rock, Texas

Rolla, Missouri

Lucerne Valley, California

Las Cruses, New Mexico

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Overland Park, Kansas

Wheaton, Illinois

Lawton, Oklahoma

Prince George, Virginia

Terre Haute, Indiana.

As long as the hometowns pile up, no one should rest in peace.

stories

Look here for part 1: http://www.porchcoffee.org/2012/02/16/place/

One week plus some change later, I get a call. From the teacher. Here’s how the call went down:

Teacher: Hey Dave…I don’t know you want to come back [he was only a little bit joking], but I’m going to need a sub for a day in two weeks.
Inside Dave’s head: Oh no. I was really hoping no calls from this guy for a while. Those kids owned me, trounced me, played me like a fiddle and hung me out to dry. Is it even physically possible for mayhem and pure chaos to NOT fly into destruction mode at the moment I walk into that room if I walk into that room again?
Dave [with the bravado of an angry mother grizzly bear]: Absolutely, bring it on!
Inside Dave’s head: you idiot.
Teacher: Great! You know the drill, and I’ll leave the day’s plan on my desk.
Dave: Perfect. How have the freshman been, have they recovered yet from that horrible day with that wackjob sub?
Teacher [laughing]: Well, they went into a pretty hard spiral, the room turned into hell on wheels for the rest of the week. But they know they’re on a short leash, things have calmed down a little bit.
Inside Dave’s head: YOU IDIOT.
Dave: ok, sounds good!
Inside Dave’s head: really. Really?

Two weeks go by, the morning comes, I wake up, have my cup of coffee and breakfast and make the long drive to the school, deep breath and in I go. The bell rings and the kids come in, easy now Dave easy, deep breath you are nothing but pure calm and tranquility and teacher, you are the champion and you are ok these kids are great, easy now Dave, easy. Little stuff let it bounce off you like tiny hail, big stuff keep your cool and do what you know how to do. Easy now Dave, easy.

And here’s what happened: it was a great day. Everything went smooth. The kids were great.

Inside Dave’s head: Right. Go figure.

photography, stories

She’s an orphan, taken in by an old widow who lives in the small community of Yula San Juan Nueva Esperanza. The widow, 65 years old, works in the fields while her daughter takes care of four orphans; a fifth orphan, a little 6 year old boy, is going to move in with them in a week.

This may be the best photo that’s come from any camera of mine–and disgruntlingly enough I wasn’t the one who took it. Deisy, a coworker, took the picture, in full-auto-mode. 1/6s shutter, iso 400, f3.0…like, what…but…how?

I tweeked the exposure in lightroom–the camera’s meter overcooked the exposure by a hair–otherwise it’s unedited.

Look at her smile.

Dear God please help this little girl to never ever forget how to spin around and dance and smile.

other

In a decision made in a momentary whim, I’ve decided to resolve some stuff this new year: I’m going to write better the first time and edit more carefully. Also I’ll write more with pen and paper.

(I only made three mid-writing edits to this post. It was really, really really hard ignoring the word-processor-cured urges, but it felt good too).