Boots: Selfie-Actualize

If you joined the US military in 2001 you could be 1/2 way through a service career and have been on combat related duty the entire time, an extraordinary fact.

13 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have exacted a heavy toll.

Our volunteer army has been run ragged.

How we acknowledge that service and sacrifice says much about who are we and in the case of our youth, who we will become.

I toured last weekend with folks from Australia and New Zealand and we visited the war memorials and Arlington Cemetery.

Walking around with non-US visitors is always interesting because you can be the recipient of a differing perspective.

Arlington Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers may be the most prominent place in America where collective respect is shown for service members killed in combat.

I was chagrined, at least, when the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown’s had to leave the “mat” and remonstrate with clueless visitors yukking it up loudly on the steps, just feet away from the Tomb.

This followed close on the heels of a veteran recording the opening of the Changing of the Guard ceremony on his “smartphone”and then loudly playing it back during the rest of it.

The final straw was a tour guide bellowing on his cell phone loud enough to be clearly heard 50 feet away.

Decorum is a diminishing aspect of society.

That diminishment is rapidly hastened by technology that places us in the center of our own special universe where we can “selfie-actualize” to our hearts content.

Our relationship with technology has now trumped actual human interaction including the defacement of public rituals.

In the process neither the living nor the dead are respected.

Such is the nature of 21st-century equality and our notion of dignity for those who served.