Poetry for Warriors
Look Away… Look Away…
A dead hero is easy to honor
Living heroes are inconvenient because they remind us what we made them become for our ideals. We should be honoring the living. But, we’d rather honor the dead — and we barely do that these days. It costs us nothing to pay lip service to dead heroes; it’s easy and abstract to honor the dead and buried.
Americans love easy and abstract… like they love womb potentialities. But, the living walking around and needing needs are a present reminder of what we owe the living. Living heroes remind us of the ugliness we demanded from them in the name of our vaunted ideals.
So many of our living heroes are struggling, lost and losing themselves all the time. Why do we turn a blind eye to their need? Because if we focus on our living heroes, we’ll have to weigh the balance of their shattering traumas against all the words of our ideals — ideals for which we asked them to sacrifice, but which our people cannot or will not live by.
Tragically, society too often turns a blind eye to them until it’s too late… until they too have become dead heroes. When I was younger, it always struck me how buried heroes were to be venerated. Yet, we want our living heroes to remain out sight and out of mind… buried alive by our disdain.
