What have we got this Memorial Day?

Over Memorial Day weekend, our Twitter timeline has be too full of rants by and about the leader of the regime in Washington, D.C. We've had almost as much of it as we can take and yet, like watching a train wreck, we can't seem to turn away.

endangered symbols of an endangered democracy?

Photo by J. Harrington

Our concerns and frustrations are compounded by remnants of the ongoing fight among factions in the Democratic party about why the last election was lost and whose fault it was. We'd like to be live that this does not represent the American democracy our father fought in World War II and the "Korean Police Action" to protect.

Dad was an architect/planner for years and years. Environmental issues and sustainable development or resilient communities had not moved near the top a planning's priority list at the time Dad was working. His sense of the common good was well developed and his distinction between right and wrong was heavily influenced by his vision of the common good.

Perhaps, like Dad, William McDonough was thinking about the common good when he noted that "Being less bad is not being good." When asked to explain, McDonough replied:

It’s a slide I was showing for all the people who feel that if they can reduce, avoid, minimize, go to zero, they are being good. I’m saying that’s inadequate. They are also explicitly telling their children and the market that it would be better if they did not even exist. Sure, it’s better to minimize energy systems to reduce carbon emissions and be efficient. But it’s insufficient. You’re still what you are saying you don’t want to be. You are driving in the wrong direction, just slower. You’re not good, just less bad. You can’t get there that way. That was yesterday. I’m talking about tomorrow. It’s time to turn around.

It seems to us that the Democrats haven't yet fully adopted the idea that being less bad than Republicans is good enough for the common good. We think we're seeing more and more progressives who are acting on that premise. We hope, as we remember this Memorial Day weekend those who have fought for the freedom we too often take for granted, that the current status we find ourselves in will shake us up enough to turn around. Maybe there aren't enough of us who remember Joni Mitchell's refrain from her 1970 hit song Big Yellow Taxi

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone 

Then again, Irish women, many of them much younger than us boomers, seemed to know what Joni  was singing about. Maybe we could get them to talk to all the US Democrats sometime soon.

Have a safe Memorial Day weekend and fill it with good memories with those you love while you still can.

Memorial Day for the War Dead

Yehuda Amichai, 1924- 2000

Memorial day for the war dead.  Add now
the grief of all your losses to their grief,
even of a woman that has left you.  Mix
sorrow with sorrow, like time-saving history,
which stacks holiday and sacrifice and mourning
on one day for easy, convenient memory.

Oh, sweet world soaked, like bread,
in sweet milk for the terrible toothless God.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”
No use to weep inside and to scream outside.
Behind all this perhaps some great happiness is hiding.

Memorial day.  Bitter salt is dressed up
as a little girl with flowers.
The streets are cordoned off with ropes,
for the marching together of the living and the dead.
Children with a grief not their own march slowly,
like stepping over broken glass.

The flautist’s mouth will stay like that for many days.
A dead soldier swims above little heads
with the swimming movements of the dead,
with the ancient error the dead have
about the place of the living water.

A flag loses contact with reality and flies off.
A shopwindow is decorated with
dresses of beautiful women, in blue and white.
And everything in three languages:
Hebrew, Arabic, and Death.

A great and royal animal is dying 
all through the night under the jasmine 
tree with a constant stare at the world.

A man whose son died in the war walks in the street
like a woman with a dead embryo in her womb.
“Behind all this some great happiness is hiding.”

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