View From The Left Coast

I spent some of a Saturday afternoon at the cemetery, pulling weeds and cleaning up the graves of the people with whom I spent the first 18 years of my life. The baby tears were growing over the plaques, the deer had been trimming the fuchsia, and the forget-me-nots were getting leggy.

As I stood up and read the plaques and looked at the ceramic photo set into the bench across the path, I wondered again where they are now. When you know somebody for 50 years it’s a hard habit to break: I still hear and see them, if only in my mind’s eye and ear. Sometimes it seems, now that they’re all dead, if all the scenes and memories we shared were really just a figment of my imagination. How do you prove these actions and conversations really took place when the only other people who saw and heard them are gone? How real and tangible are things like memories, conversations, or even relationships?

My mom’s paintings, my dad’s watch, the butcher block that used to be in my brother’s kitchen all argue they WERE here, and they had lives and impacted my life and the lives of others, living and dead. They lived and loved, created and destroyed, lived 46 years, or 73, or 82, but now all that’s left are these pictures and words, and an ever-shrinking number of memories (mine and others) in the lives they helped to shape. That’s why I’m here at the cemetery cleaning up: As long as I’m alive I’ll feel obligated to keep these words and pictures from being obliterated by nature in an attempt to keep them connected to this world.

I understand now much better why people need to believe in heaven or some sort of afterlife. Something in our souls has trouble thinking of people who were so alive and important to us just being gone. Outside of our hearts they have no more substance than a passing cloud or a breath of wind. I try to imagine what they would be thinking if they were standing here looking down at my grave. Would they believe that we would meet again? Would they laugh at some joke we’d shared 30 years ago? Bristle at an argument that took place in 1966?

I’m not a very religious person, so I don’t see us all getting back together and talking about where we’ve been or what we’ve thought since we last saw each other. On the other hand, that’s one of the few things I’d be very glad to be proved wrong about.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 05:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

While Guantanamo is hardly anything America can be proud of, it still hasn’t achieved the ignominy of Manzanar. From 1942 until 1945, over 110,000 men, women and children of Japanese descent, mostly American citizens, were deprived of their property and imprisoned without charge in Manzanar and nine other hastily built prison camps. American citizens.

There are, they tell us, no Americans being held at Guantanamo. Yet. But the people who are there, picked up from various places around the world and imprisoned, without charge, have been beaten, tortured, harassed and humiliated, some for as long as four years. There is no guarantee of a trial, the “quaint� Geneva Conventions don’t protect them, and there is no hope for any of them. Is it any wonder there have been at least 40 attempted suicides there?

The suicides last week of three men, one of whom was scheduled for release, were called acts of war by their captors, and a good public relations move. They were criticized for having been uncooperative and hostile toward their captors, and Harry Harris said “they have no regard for human life, neither ours or their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation, but an act of asymmetric war against us.� How callous can you get? Try for a moment, Harry, to put yourself in their shoes: armed men pick you up, fly you continents away from your home, put you in prison and torture you, for years, with no chance for a trial, and no hope you will ever be free.

How would you feel, Harry?

Now once again the European Union is calling for the closure of Guantanamo, as are other nations, but as long as Dick Cheney is de-facto president, he has made it clear there is no hope for the inmates there. The orders that set up secret prisons, torture and mass murder, that have killed and maimed thousands of American soldiers, have spied on American citizens. . .these orders came from one man: Dick Cheney.

In a larger sense, Guantanamo is a learning opportunity for America, and for the world. We are learning how human rights can be suspended in ANY country, that one man can seize power in ANY country, that years or imprisonment and torture can lead men to take their own lives, and that, as in World War II, the rest of the world is, at least in the short term, powerless to stop maniacs with huge arsenals behind them.

Guantanamo is no Manzanar or Auschwitz yet, but in the annals of man’s inhumanity to man, it certainly deserves camparison. And OUR shame for letting it exist is no less than that of the Germans in the 1930’s and 40’s, or the Americans who allowed whole families of their fellow citizens to be stripped of their possessions and imprisoned in the California desert.

Posted by Walt Frazer at 02:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)