Infamy, Then and Now

Today is, as Matt just pointed out to me, Pearl Harbor Day, a day more real to me this year after receiving the incredible gift of getting to watch my grandfather, and other American Fighter Aces, receive the Congressional Medal of Honor this last May. It was one of those serendipitous experiences that you don’t get to anticipate because you don’t even know they’re on the horizon. A very short few weeks before the ceremony my grandmother called to say it was happening, we flung ourselves into gear to be there–clothes, hotel arrangements, schedule juggling–and then, at the very last minute, my parents also were miraculously able to fly in from Africa. And so there we were, in the capital, with all these men whose bravery had pushed forward the war effort. “The Aces,” my grandmother kept whispering in my ear, “helped turn the tide in the Pacific.”

After the ceremony we and my parents and grandparents caravanned back up to Binghamton and we had a few days together, my grandmother pottering about my garden and sorting out my china cupboard, me churning out meals at a remarkably slow and frustrating pace, my parents fussing over and ferrying my grandparents around, but most importantly, Matt holding his phone in his hand, silently pushing record, and then asking questions like, “What was it like to land on the aircraft carrier?” And “How did the catapult mechanism work to launch the plane off the carrier?” From the last question we learned that you could go from 0 to 80 miles an hour in sixty seconds.

The picture at the top of this blog, the original of which is much grander and sweeping and which I spent a long time working on to make it perfect, was snapped by me in the moments before we went inside the Capitol building, into Constitution Hall. Matt, in full clericals, stood gazing up at the imposing edifice of power, the children twirling round the fountain, a minuscule American flag flapping wilding in the wind afar off. The day was cool, cloudy, the color of the sky brooding against the stone. All the outward symbols of strength, order, law, power sitting solidly on the immaculate stone pavement.

Inside we all had to be so perfectly good. The children sat and sat and wondered in whispers how long, dear mother, how long before they could stop being good. Finally the band, the Battle Hymn of the Republic, the formal invocation, and then speeches from the top four political movers and shakers in our government at that moment–wide eyed Nancy Pelosi, a tottering Harry Reid, the teary John Boehner, and Mitch McConnell, who seemed vaguely normal in that setting. These people must surely be human, I thought to myself. They are so small. They look so frail. Do they, I wonder, any longer feel the weight of responsibility breathing out from these walls? I tried to let go of my political ideals and breathe in the honor and glory of seeing my grandfather, who sacrificed so much, be recognized for his bravery and skill.

The outward and visible forms of power and honor last much longer than those spiritual realities in the human heart. A weak and selfish person can stand up in the edifice of authority and undermine and corrupt the true reality that must be lived out where the buildings are ugly and the people are poor and powerless. Binghamton is afar off from that vast beautiful square, that elegant and imposing hall. Our streets are dingy, our buildings decaying and melting away. No one comes to our elbow to remind us where to go next. We have to navigate the bureaucratic maze of building regulations, government services, healthcare affordability, traffic patterns, health and safety laws, insurance, I could go on, all on our own. The question is, do we still bear the imprints of honor, duty, self sacrifice, and even civilizational hope on the narrow confines of our souls?

This weekend, when I learned that the executive branch was going to fully integrate women into all levels of combat in every realm, and that that would necessarily mean the conscription of women, and then I looked at the picture of a woman in hijab in California, who willingly killed and died for her faith, and then heard nothing about the beliefs that led her to that moment from our own president, the only word I could breathe out was “barbaric”.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, my grandfather, and all the men with him, went out immediately to fight, to protect, to die, for those they love, my grandmother, me eventually. And the women were brave. They stepped up, they didn’t sniffle. They worked, hard, and endured. But we, as a culture, are willing for that sacrifice to float away in our own disordered, weak, unjust, selfishness. That we would ask, and then require women to fight on the front lines, in combat (which I know we already do) is barbarous, is a shame on us, though we do not feel it.

On this day, when so many died, I wish, nay, pray that we could turn around and go in the opposite direction.