Yesterday's Yesterday on Special Today

Today is the way I like to begin things, because today is when most things begin. Today I got up in the morning and it was about to rain. And in today there is always all of yesterday and all of yesterday’s yesterday. All of my yesterdays and all of my parents yesterdays here today. Then again none of them. Today is the way I like to begin things because it’s always today when you start out to do anything. Today I got up and I walked to the subway station at 137th street and I took the number 1 train to work where I didn’t really feel like working at all and where the work I did do was denigrated by a tired old man who ought to go take a nap every once in a while.

In the middle of work I got up and walked to class in an oddly shaped room in a building that is not really a building, but an extension. And in this extension is where they house all the marginal studies having to do with race and gender and memory. In this class led by two people who are married but have different last names we tried to get our minds around what it means to be living in the post-memory of the Vietnam War, and I found myself telling the story I’ve told before about having two uncles. One uncle who was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War and one who was a Conscientious Objector and had long hair. I told them how the one uncle, the one who went to fight, wrote a Conscientious Objector letter for the other. And I told them how my mother protested the war. And I told them about our family email list where the emails fly right and left and how no matter what the email is about it’s always a little bit about Vietnam.

Today in my mind were all the images and all the words of all the films I had been watching all week. All about The Fog of War and about Vietnam on tv. And then suddenly it hit me that when the one uncle – the one who fought – continuously sends out angry emails about why we should be outraged that someone would call General Petraeus, General Betray-us, and when he accuses the rest of the family over and over again of not supporting the troops, this is really about his feelings that we have not supported him. His family did not support him and the war he risked his life in.

Despite the startling realization this week that I actually knew very little of what the Vietnam War was about and why we were fighting it, it permeates my everyday life and my relationship with my family in very real and sometimes emotionally-trying ways. So, today I get up and go to work and I go to class and I get drenched by the cold October rain and I think about Vietnam and realize that I think about Vietnam every day in real ways as I stand in the shower and try to breathe out the frustration that I’ll never be understood by one of my uncles and that trying to talk to him about anything that matters is fruitless and that I should just settle for pictures of his grandkids.

I should settle for the pictures of the grandkids and hope that by the time they’re old enough to really realize what’s going on in the world around them that the country they live in will have put an end to petty wars that bring up all the other wars in which people who are still living have fought. Because truly, it’s not fair to anyone and we ought to know better by now.