Time to let it linger, on Veteran's Day

First appeared on November 10th, 2015
in The Lebanon Reporter

Francis Scott Key penned the Star Spangled Banner after watching the British shelling Fort McHenry during the War of 1812. Fortunately for us Mr. Key didn’t have a Smart Phone or he’d probably have missed most of the rocket’s red glare. For you and I this means our national anthem would most likely be “YMCA” or something by Dylan we’d all be forced to mumble in unison.

The first time I realized the flag was special was watching my older brother playing varsity basketball. The way a gym packed to the gills would rise together in silence, the energy of the impending contest and eager conversations of the blustery hayseeds suddenly tamed by a sober reverence for the flag.

And when the people sat down and the ball went up, I watched my brother throwing himself around on the floor, playing his guts out and he became a hero. November is reserved for heroes of a different lot. Those who personified honor, sacrifice and duty. The words often fall short for those of us on the outside looking in.

However, the flag bridges those two worlds. An omnipresent reminder that the duty of those who never served is to honor those who have. The flag is a one dimensional time machine capable of dropping you onto a battlefield in Gettysburg where you’re asked to charge across a vast open plain with nothing more than a blade of grass to hide behind, all the while a hailstorm of hot metal rains down upon you. And above the din of cannon fire and muskets, the piercing cries of men surround you, haunting and final.

It can take you to Normandy, where you’re shoulder to shoulder with a kid a country mile from the prime of life. And, when the panel of that landing craft drops, he glimpses for the first time the insurmountable odds awaiting him. The flag stands for the courage he showed to vault himself into the waist-deep tide. Water stained pink from the blood of friends, Nazi flak buzzing and ricocheting around him.

So you catch your eleven year old fooling with his phone during the Star Spangled Banner and, oh say, you can definitely see you’ve failed as a parent. This was it, your Final Exam and you just posted the old one legged A.

Mortified, you tell little Johnny he won’t see his phone until he’s 25 before throwing him in the car. You tear out of town, barreling east across the Ohio, pointing your wheels towards D.C. And somewhere around Harrisburg you find yourself hopelessly lost and have to ask Johnny to Google a new route.

By dawn’s early light you find yourself at the intersection of history, architecture, tradition and new ideas, the seat of change and heartbeat of freedoms continued evolution. But Washington is also a living celebration of those Americans who dared to defend our ideals. Stone figures with strong jowls, faces racked with determination, men who gave themselves up for a nation, a nation of people they would never come to know.

Old dead men who today find themselves surrounded by hot dog vendors and tee-shirt hockers, googly eyed tourists lost in a jungle of copper, bronze and limestone. And the limestone, my god the limestone, walls and halls and corridors, benches and arches, cornices, balustrades, everything we so proudly hailed carved from limestone.

Streets choked with slow moving tour buses carting anxious, pimply faced pre-teens. Kites of bright red and yellow, tails dragging in the wind, waving high above the rangers in broad-brimmed hats. Brave men and women charged with corralling the interest of these precocious pre-teens.
Bleary eyed, over medicated and restless children who don’t know George Bush from George Washington. And all this exploration and congestion and protestation rages before the watchful eyes of Honest Abe from his perch at the end of the Mall, his brow bent with uncertainty over the scene before him.

So stately upon his throne, high overlooking the reflecting pool, Lincoln has become the poster child for standing up for ones ideals. And as great as he was, how easily we forget Honest Abe’s line in the sand was defended by the hearts and souls of thousands.

We have to find a way to stop our lives, forgo the order and rigid scheduling and prioritized lists that shape our time. We owe this to all who’ve protected the freedoms we as Americans cherish.

So there you stand, in the shadow of Lincoln. You and little Johnny and little Johnny’s Smart Phone. And you linger as the pimply faced pre-teens race up and down the steps before an incredulous Ranger. You linger as the kites race higher and higher. You linger with little Johnny’s hand in yours. You linger so that these dead shall not have died in vain.

© 2015 Eric Walker Williams

Bad Haircuts and the Death of America

First appeared on February 28, 2014
in The Lebanon Reporter

The Federal Court system is a complex entity managed by a group of highly decorated and intelligent men and women. The kind who rarely answer their own phones or experience the joy of cleaning up after their dog. People entrusted with the sobering responsibility of maintaining public order by holding dangerous criminals accountable or deciding if a basketball coach has the right to tell a player to cut his hair.

Nobody should take a 14 year old to task for anything his parents have allowed to happen. This is more about the parents. In fact, this is more about the parents currently suing their school corporation in Greensburg to challenge a coach’s right to demand his players meet certain expectations (hair that is above the ears, eyes and collar) in order to be part of a team.

‘Part of a team’. We don’t even understand what that means anymore. Today part of a team means everyone plays the same amount of minutes and receives the same sized trophy. This socialist approach has fostered a land of individuals choking on a sense of entitlement.

During WW II we were a team. Rosie the Riveter declared “We can do it”, not “I”. The result was a historic mobilization of labor and sacrifice that propelled us to Superpower status. This was unfortunately short-lived. We kept the Superpower status because it was cool and got us into all the best parties, we just gave up the working hard part.

In a world of instant gratification, ‘earning’ something through sacrifice has become altogether foreign. We round bellied Americans have been far too busy living off the momentum of the Forties and Fifties for any of that nonsense.

By definition a true team does not exist amidst the absence of hard work and sacrifice. Yet today hard work and sacrifice are looked upon as mere annoyances our great grandfathers had to deal with because there were only three channels on television and Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet. Our younger generations have developed a troubling clinical phobia of sacrifice and nobody is to blame but we as parents.

So little Johnny crawls out to meet the world and is blanketed with the popping flash of camera bulbs before being crowned ‘Greatest Child Ever’. The way he slobbers and chews on his teething ring is unlike any before. He may not be able to fight through a setback, but he can count to twelve in French.

And when they leave diapers, the skies only darken. Far too often we as parents tell our children their teachers and coaches CAN’T do something, as if the Founding Fathers, when not busy framing the Constitution, were getting tossed from AAU tournaments and going nose to nose with little Sally Jefferson’s cheer coach. When I was 14 I brought a paper home to my mom, complaining the cold hearted snake who moonlighted by day as my English Teacher had “given me a D”. After reviewing my work, my mom’s immediate response was “You should be happy, I’d have given you an F.” And to his credit, my father never once questioned my high school coach for refusing to play the greatest shooter in the history of basketball more.

It’s not their fault. In trying to do the right thing for our kids we unwittingly take their side in everything, thus dismissing persistence and determination. We are poisoning their perception of reality and accelerating the deterioration of the American Dream simultaneously. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians or the Lakers, every great civilization throughout history has eventually crumbled. NEWS FLASH- America isn't far behind. The good news is China and India are loving every minute of it, the bad news is fixing it will require a lot of hard work.

© 2014 Eric Walker Williams