6.11.2004
How We Choose to Honor The Dead
According to my Mother-in-law, I'm unpatriotic and a bad American because I think that Ronald Reagan's service is overly melodramatic facade. IMHO, rather than celebrating his life and achievements, they are glorifying one man above their own belief in God. It seems as though they are turning the whole affair into idolatry: worshipping an image, figure, or statue before God, which would be a direct violation of the First Commandment.
It is a human flaw to see any one human being as somehow better than another. We are all the same "stuff." We all have the same potential to be saints or sinners. We all have the ability to become great leaders of goodness, or great leaders of evil. Honoring a life and a legacy of service to one's country should be done not with pomp and circumstance, but with honest subdued humility and silence. It is not necessary to make a person seem even greater than they were to honor them. Simply honor them. That's all.
As far as my Mother-in-law is concerned, I should keep my disloyal and disrespectful thoughts to myself. I should simply turn the channel and ignore the ceremony in silence if I do not agree with it. After all, who am I to judge? She sees me as a failure trying to disgrace a great man (Ask her any other time, and she will say that Ronald Reagan did nothing to help her when she was desperate and poor. Now that he's died, he's transcended sainthood).
My Mother-in-law is a staunch FDR Democrat who was raised during the Great Depression, but she sees Regan now as a "Father of our country" along with all the others who came before him. She thinks I have disgraced my service to my country and if any of my bosses knew how I felt, they would fire me in an instant for being so disloyal and disrespectful to my country and its people. She comes from an era where people did not question authority and respected all ceremony as sacred. I wonder what her reaction will be if they attempt to replace FDR's image on the dime with Reagan's.
Even if all this pomp and pageantry is meant for some purpose I cannot fathom, I find it repugnant that anyone would want their life to be so distorted and one-sided. Reagan was not perfect. His decisions were not always the greatest. He played a pivotal role in a controversial time, but that doesn't make him anything more than a human being. Let's remember him not for just the good things he did, but everything he did. Let's remember him as a complete person, not just a partial one. Let us forsake the ego in favor of something greater than the sum of our parts.
This ceremony provides politicians with yet another method of winning the hearts and minds of their constituents to their cause. They have used it as both a distraction from the other events of the day, and as propaganda for their own purpose. While we are taking the time to morn the passing of Ronald Reagan, other people are suffering and dying all over the world, and yet we do not blink twice about that. Our collective attentions are so focused in on the grandness of the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. that the rest of the world could blow up and nobody would notice. One human being can make a difference, but no one human being should become so all important that we lose the ability to remember that we are all one human being.
This demonstration provides us with yet another example of how impossible it is to separate religion from politics. They are entwined at the very roots of humanity. They speak the same language and the lines are deliberately blurred so that many people would never realize they had crossed one for the other. Religion was the first organized political system. All other political systems grew out of theocratic orders. As long as we hold onto the idea that we can somehow mix the two, we will never be able to stop warring amongst ourselves over idealology, economics, power, and greed. I only hope we can outgrow this before it is too late.
Ronald Reagan deserves to be honored as a statesman, a leader, an entertainer, and ultimately, as the 40th United States President. Of this I have no complaint. What I have seen in the past week from the media and from ceremonies all over the world is something that does nothing to help the human condition, rather it takes everything that is good about it away. When we make one man out to be greater than he is, we diminish ourselves in the process.
© 2004, J.S.Brown
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It is a human flaw to see any one human being as somehow better than another. We are all the same "stuff." We all have the same potential to be saints or sinners. We all have the ability to become great leaders of goodness, or great leaders of evil. Honoring a life and a legacy of service to one's country should be done not with pomp and circumstance, but with honest subdued humility and silence. It is not necessary to make a person seem even greater than they were to honor them. Simply honor them. That's all.
As far as my Mother-in-law is concerned, I should keep my disloyal and disrespectful thoughts to myself. I should simply turn the channel and ignore the ceremony in silence if I do not agree with it. After all, who am I to judge? She sees me as a failure trying to disgrace a great man (Ask her any other time, and she will say that Ronald Reagan did nothing to help her when she was desperate and poor. Now that he's died, he's transcended sainthood).
My Mother-in-law is a staunch FDR Democrat who was raised during the Great Depression, but she sees Regan now as a "Father of our country" along with all the others who came before him. She thinks I have disgraced my service to my country and if any of my bosses knew how I felt, they would fire me in an instant for being so disloyal and disrespectful to my country and its people. She comes from an era where people did not question authority and respected all ceremony as sacred. I wonder what her reaction will be if they attempt to replace FDR's image on the dime with Reagan's.
Even if all this pomp and pageantry is meant for some purpose I cannot fathom, I find it repugnant that anyone would want their life to be so distorted and one-sided. Reagan was not perfect. His decisions were not always the greatest. He played a pivotal role in a controversial time, but that doesn't make him anything more than a human being. Let's remember him not for just the good things he did, but everything he did. Let's remember him as a complete person, not just a partial one. Let us forsake the ego in favor of something greater than the sum of our parts.
This ceremony provides politicians with yet another method of winning the hearts and minds of their constituents to their cause. They have used it as both a distraction from the other events of the day, and as propaganda for their own purpose. While we are taking the time to morn the passing of Ronald Reagan, other people are suffering and dying all over the world, and yet we do not blink twice about that. Our collective attentions are so focused in on the grandness of the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. that the rest of the world could blow up and nobody would notice. One human being can make a difference, but no one human being should become so all important that we lose the ability to remember that we are all one human being.
This demonstration provides us with yet another example of how impossible it is to separate religion from politics. They are entwined at the very roots of humanity. They speak the same language and the lines are deliberately blurred so that many people would never realize they had crossed one for the other. Religion was the first organized political system. All other political systems grew out of theocratic orders. As long as we hold onto the idea that we can somehow mix the two, we will never be able to stop warring amongst ourselves over idealology, economics, power, and greed. I only hope we can outgrow this before it is too late.
Ronald Reagan deserves to be honored as a statesman, a leader, an entertainer, and ultimately, as the 40th United States President. Of this I have no complaint. What I have seen in the past week from the media and from ceremonies all over the world is something that does nothing to help the human condition, rather it takes everything that is good about it away. When we make one man out to be greater than he is, we diminish ourselves in the process.
TANSTAAFL!
© 2004, J.S.Brown
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