Land of the free, home of the brave

Ya know, it's probably time to get this thing going again. Been a while for no particular reason other than local history takes time and I kept running out of it. So the future probably will include more introspection and less history. Don't mean to disappoint, but it is my blog, after all.

Visiting this morning with a friend in England about British vs. American television (and my affection for expensive British mystery series on DVD) got me to thinking.

I do not watch television at all here in Mason City during the work week, but sometimes do evenings at the house in Chariton. Two programs this weekend past were especially affecting. PBS's "Frontline: The Age of AIDS" astonished me by jerking me back and reminding me how much fury, frustration and sorrow a few years had managed to dilute --- The U.S. has a very short attention span and once reasonably effective H.I.V. medication was available here and the death rate slowed, we managed to almost stop thinking about it, even though some 40 million or more are now infected worldwide. They are mostly "those people," black and/or poor, gay, I.V. drug users, of course, and although we are a remarkable nation, we are a remarkably prejudiced one, too. Sorry to say, I realized I'd almost stopped thinking about it as well. Mustn't do that.

The other, "American Experience: Two Days in October," juxtaposed 17 October 1967, the day 64 of 142 U.S. troops died in a Viet Cong ambush in Vietnam, with 18 October 1967, the day police responded with extreme brutality to a large student anti-war protest on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. That one broke my heart.

I was vulnerable.

Met a buddy of mine (a combat veteran; I was a Saigon warrior --- military intelligence) at the Vietnam memorial in Des Moines early Sunday. He brought beer and cigarettes (for them, not us; such things were sacred over there back then), I brought roses and we sat down and read the 853 names on the memorial one-by-one and then bawled about it --- early, as I said, so at least we didn't make a public spectacle of ourselves.

It's 80 (F), sunny and clear here in the heartland this morning, and I've got to get to Super Wal-Mart, where hundreds of us will be scrambling for thousands of things we don't need --- all under one roof; just what those guys fought and died for. It takes courage to go to Wal-Mart at mid-morning, but we don't call ourselves the land of the free and the home of the brave for nothing.