Yesterday, I posted a link sent to me by a friend. Here are some further thoughts he sent me:
See, yesterday, I was hobbling around a VA hospital, jumping through bureaucratic hoops so I could go home. The last hoop to stumble through was to pick up my travel pittance (disabled vets get that). Actually, I'm being unfair. The funds allowed, per mile, are more than adequate if you hitchhike, sleep in a ditch, and look at the whole thing as fasting practice.
Anyhow, the lady at the cashier's window was about 45 or so, her face crisscrossed with stress lines, the corners of her lips turned down-- the saddest permanent frown I'd heretofore seen. Red-eyed, unkempt.
On her cubicle's right was the reason:
Photo of a very-young Marine-- likely the first time he'd worn his dress blues. "11-01-05" and "Iraq" told me that sometime last November he'd worn those one last time, forever.
It would have been totally inauthentic for me to ignore something as plain as that -- at least, something plain as that to someone like me. So I offered the sincerest condolences I could, that I could find words for -- and as neutrally put as I could.
I also told her that I write, sometimes well enough to be appreciated by some of the few who, remarkably, still have an interest in the printed word. And I told her I intended to fashion something to illustrate the meaning of her child's dying.
I have no idea what that something will be. But I'm certain what I want it to do: I want just one person to turn off their fucking television set for a while, and in its stead read something outside that silly, stupid Media paradigm. Something to facilitate learning just a little bit about how and why -- and most important! -- the fact itself, viz. that the person has been living in a world built of lies... one where even the simplest of mental processes have been skewed, so skewed that the most blatant of obvious nonsense is routinely lapped up, like a dog eagerly licking at the ploppings from a baby's diaper.
I want that person to begin learning to see what I saw in that shattered mother's face. I want that person to begin to think.
--Stieger