….Gone to graveyards, every one.

I am sure, somewhere in America, someone is dusting off that old protest song about where the flowers and soldiers have all gone. Something else is gone, too. Something the song doesn’t talk about, but it used to be in every school social studies book about America: the concept of a “melting pot” of peoples.

Now, I am not such an idealistic-moron-wandering-in-the-dark that I don’t know full well that America is not a massive fondue pot. We don’t make a pretty, golden goo of wine and cheese melted into a silky easy to swallow meal to be devoured with laughter and song. America is more like a stew with every thing separate and flavorful, but tied together with blue jeans and red, white, and blue ribbons. I rather like that it doesn’t all melt into a homogenized mass of bland. I like Irish potatoes and hot red Mexican chiles and good strong German rye bread and all other kinds of “separate” flavors. But, all the same, some things I liked about that idea—mostly that we were all in the same kettle, and therefore needed to get along.

The latest of several pings about how we are so not doing that, and a relatively minor one at that, is how often recently people go to court claiming they are discriminated against by something pretty minor: a very right wing Christian didn’t want her co-workers to put up Halloween decorations cause, oh, my goody-two-shoeness incarnate, that was “exposing her to paganism.” Uh-huh, this, brought to you by the same sort of people pissing and moaning cause they can’t put a Nativity Scene on the courthouse steps. Or, in Seattle recently, when a Jewish rabbi asked if a menorah could be included in the holiday decorations at SeaTac Airport, the airport made a big humongous fuss and ordered the Christmas trees taken down. Cause, no by Gawd, we can’t include no stinkin’ menorah—and see, you kike bastard, you spoiled it for the rest of us! No, asshat….YOU exculsionary reactionary dumbass, YOU spoiled it for everyone. Like in the case of the Muslim mother who asked, at her children’s school, if a decoration emblematic of Ramadan could be included in the fall decorations—-and a spoiled and spoiling school board member ordered a ban on ALL holiday decorations. Cause, by all that is holy and ethno-frickin-centric, we couldn’t possibly acknowledge EVERYone, now could we? Like the school my children attended, teaching very Christian hymns in music class, though both Jewish and Muslim children had to take the required class—my protests got me looked at as if I had fallen out of the sky while flaming. “But you aren’t Jewish or Muslim, are you? So why do you care?” Yeah, they said that. Hello, you idiots….public school, public funds, Constitutional “no establishment of religion” clause……you guys graduated college without somehow internalizing that? Insert highly ethnocentric expletives here!

So, what has this to do with my title? Well, groping about in my own mind, sorrowful to see segments of my population marginalized, excluded and scape-goated for “spoiling it for everyone” when all they asked for was being included in the fun, I found an inclusionary place after all.

It is the list of those soldiers, “gone to graveyards every one” from the Iraqi and Afghanistani wars. The sad, tear-drenched litany of their names reveals every ethnicity, every gender, every religious tradition in America in their names. I wish I could sing, this old former Catholic would happily render the list into Gregorian chant to give that list the dignity and awe it deserves; it is the seeming last place in America where you can be safely included even if your survivors do have to fight for what religious symbol goes on your gravestone. But that is another story….

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