Usually, I would be at a parade right now, and then a cemetery service, honoring men and women from the United States Armed Forces who paid for my freedom with their lives. I'm eternally grateful for their sacrifices, and I feel a tremendous responsibility to these brave people whom I never met. I know that, as they fought in foxholes and jungles and deserts, flew in airplanes, served on aircraft carriers and submarines, first and foremost on all their minds was family. Mothers. Fathers. Brothers. Sisters. Friends. Wives. Husbands. Children. These soldiers went into battle because they wanted the world to be a better place for their loved ones. Safer. Freer.
We are in a strange moment in history. A moment that many of those courageous men and women never imagined. The enemy isn't some fascist dictator trying to conquer the world. Or some terrorist organization dedicated to fear and destruction. The enemy right now is unseen. Microscopic. Indiscriminate. Deadly. And it is threatening the entire planet.
We need to take some lessons from the men and women we honor today. Yes, they were afraid. Knew they might leave their parents childless, their children parentless. Yet, they were willing to make that sacrifice to give future generations something better. That is the burden we accept from them at this time.
The sacrifices we need to make right now are tiny compared to the sacrifices these fallen warriors made. To make the world safer, freer, we need to stay at home, not storm a beach under machine gun fire. We need to wear face masks, not to protect ourselves from mustard gas, but a virus. We need to wash our hands, not to rinse off the blood of our wounded friends, but to protect ourselves from infection. We can still get take-out pizza. We're not hunkered in trenches eating K-rations.
The easy sacrifices of today are to ensure something better for tomorrow. And they honor those men and women who ran into battle for us, with nothing more than hope for our future in their eyes. That is the miracle of today.
For that, and for those fallen heroes, Saint Marty gives thanks.
Something Better
by: Martin Achatz
I want something better for my kids,
The way all parents want their offspring
To attend college, law or medical
School. Do something extraordinary.
We scrub toilets, paint walls, deep-fry potatoes
For thirty or forty years, put everything
On hold until we're sure our daughters
Can study veterinary medicine, our sons
Learn to x-ray broken vertebrae, tibias,
Clavicles. My uncle drove to the GM plant
For over thirty-five years before he received
His pension, then began to paint oil landscapes
Of places he’d dreamed about in rush hour
Traffic on I-75, places full of waves,
Evergreens the color of Chinese jade,
Places he knew he'd never see,
All so his daughter could study,
Become an engineer at Ford.
I don’t want my children to teach
College English part-time, work
Eleven-hour days in an office,
Scribble poems on napkins, lunch bags,
Margins of graded essays, dreaming
Always of a time when those words,
Cut and polished and set in lines of gold,
Will buy vacations to Stockholm or Rome,
Ballet lessons and birthday parties
In hot air balloons. I want my kids
To know a life better than mine,
Even if it means I eat bologna
With cheese every day, pretending
My cut of lunch meat is somehow
Superior to the one my father ate
At work for over fifty years.
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