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VeteransNovember 12, 2007 It's Veterans Day observed, though not Armistice Day -- how can anyone mess with the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month? -- so I'm not totally late. It is, however, the day after my uncle Neville's birthday. The older I get, the more synergistic becomes the link between Veterans Day and my uncle Neville's birthday. Nev was a lost and gentle soul: all the years of my growing up, he lived in the house he'd grown up in, which is to say my grandmother's house. I grew up a mile away and spent a fair amount of time over there. The house was big by the standards of the day, and though Nev and Grandma lived within the same walls, their paths crossed but without much interaction -- as two trains might run alongside each other or pass through the same trainyard without the passengers on one being more than glancingly aware of the passengers on the other. After Grandma died, however, in February 1976, Nev cracked up. Seriously cracked up -- nervous breakdown cracked up -- spent-time-in-a-mental-hospital cracked up. Most of the rest of his life (he died in the late 1980s) he lived in group houses where he had friends and easy access to various urban things to do, like movies and restaurants. I think he was a lot happier after he got out of that house. Neville was unusual enough among the men in my family's circles that he required some explanation, and the explanation was usually some variation of "he was shell-shocked in the war" -- World War II, that would be. Nev never married; the explanation for that was predictable and, in my mind at least, somewhat related to the war: the love of his life hadn't waited for him, or maybe she'd died. During my twenties I caught on that this predictable explanation often camouflaged another surmise that generally wasn't spoken out loud: that the party in question was gay. Some people probably are so traumatized by the loss of a love that they remain celibate, or at least single, for the rest of their lives, but in most cases the conventional version reverses cause and effect: a person is less likely to remain single because s/he was traumatized than to invent a story of being traumatized in order to explain lifelong bachelor- or spinsterhood. Or, even more likely, the story is invented on the person's behalf. Over the years I've said dozens of times that my uncle Neville was "probably gay," but as explanations go this isn't much more illuminating than "he was shell-shocked in the war." "Gay" and "Shell-Shocked" are handy folders to file people in when you don't want to think further about what makes them tick. Time comes when you (might) want to dump all the scraps of evidence out of the folder and see if there might be other ways to put them together. So what I can't help noticing is that my uncle Neville shared several characteristics and tendencies with my other uncles and my parents, several of whom never got close to the war and most of whom presented enough evidence of heterosexuality that "he was probably gay" is a stretch. ("He was probably gay" deserves a blog, if not a small book, of its own, but as we all know I can follow a tangent all around the known universe and come up for air ten thousand words later so we'll leave it for another time.) Each of my parents had two brothers and no sisters. As a group I'd characterize them as pleasant and passive. I've often said of myself that had it been up to me, the wheel never would have been invented: dragging things along on a framework of sticks works fine, doesn't it, and if something's too heavy to drag, maybe you really don't need it? The two uncles, one on each side of the family, who were most successful at meeting their obligations and generally functioning in the world were the ones who married women strong enough to keep them focused. Naturally these women were held in contempt by the rest of the family, especially the one who removed her husband from close-in family orbit; that's a big reason that it took me many, many years to appreciate what they managed to accomplish. What made the real difference? I sure don't think it was wedded bliss or anything to do with traditional family values; I think it had to do with expectations. Sure, expectations can get out of control, but when they sink below a certain threshold you have little incentive to get up in the morning, and if you decline to get up for a certain number of mornings, not getting up develops a certain momentum. (The idea that inertia can have momentum may strike you as weird, if not downright paradoxical, and maybe it's nonsensical when applied to inanimate objects, but when applied to human beings? Take a look around you. It explains a lot.) Come to think of it, unrealistically high -- or highly unrealistic -- expectations may eventually produce the same visible results as no expectations at all: passivity and inertia. That would describe my mother's side of the family. On my father's side, occupying your niche in the lineage seemed to be the only requirement: all the rest was optional. On both sides of the family, the wolf never came anywhere close to the door, so the expectations that keep the overwhelming majority of the world's people getting up in the morning and putting one foot in front of the other -- if you don't get up and work, you won't eat -- weren't in effect. My siblings and I haven't had the same option, and if I had to point to a single reason that we've managed better than our parents or our uncles, that would be it. Living on Martha's Vineyard all these years has pretty much cured me of trust-fund envy; watching George W. Bush in action is also instructive. (This is not to say that if anyone out there wants to invest a million dollars and deposit the income in my checking account, I will turn down the offer.) So what does all this have to do with Veterans Day? Veterans Day, like Memorial Day, is an occasion for repeating certain tenets of the national faith, which might be summarized by the bumper sticker I see around from time to time: "If you love your freedom, thank a vet." Deconstructing bumper stickers can be hazardous to your intelligence, especially if you mistake the result for political theory, but still . . . For my freedoms I'm more inclined to thank all the veterans of the civil rights movement, the women's liberation movement, the labor movement, and so on and on. I was born six years after World War II ended, and in my lifetime the connection between fighting wars and loving freedom has been less than self-evident. The older I get, the less convinced I am that most of us do "love our freedom" -- I suspect that at least some of the time we're scared to death of it and would happily trade it for a life of clear expectations, such as might be expected in the military or any other large bureaucracy. But on Veterans Day and Memorial Day we take it on faith that we do love our freedom and that we should thank the veterans, which is to say the military, for the fact that we have it. My uncle Neville came back changed from World War II; "shell-shocked" means changed in a way that the changes couldn't be discreetly hidden the way they're supposed to be. How could anyone go to war -- go to a shooting war, where you're continually at risk for being blown away or terribly maimed -- and not come back changed? We're supposed to acknowledge that the vets endured some kind of hell, but the vets aren't supposed to act like it. Since the Vietnam War, more veterans have been less reticent, and if you combine their stories with the images available on any TV screen, how can anyone not understand that war is insane -- and that accepting it as inevitable makes us all its accomplices? By thanking vets for our freedom we're letting ourselves off the hook. I never asked my uncle what happened in the war. I never asked about that lost love of his life. You bet I never asked him if he was gay. If inertia can develop momentum, so can silence. Silence is self-perpetuating. Silence makes words hard to form and even harder to speak; it distorts the sound of those that manage to be spoken. We expect the silence to continue, and we grow uneasy when the silence is threatened. Thinking about one of my favorite stories here: "The Emperor's New Clothes." We could stand to spend more time plumbing the silence of all those people, from the emperor's courtiers to all the people waiting for the parade to pass by.
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