Are We Growing Up?

Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers returned from World War II to almost universal approval, parades, honors and public adulation. They were called America's Greatest Generation. The general most identified with this war was elected President by a huge margin.

Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers returned from Vietnam to a very mixed reaction, a good deal of public scorn, and honor largely only among each other. They were called America's Lost Generation. Nobody seemed to want to identify with this war, but among those that were publicly associated there was one President who resigned in disgrace, and one future unsuccessful presidential candidate whose Congressional testimony discussed participating in numerous war crimes.

Now we have Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and Enduring Freedom.

Well, the approval is back, and the honors are back. The adulation isn't there much anymore, but if you talk to a WWII vet, they never understood the adulation anyway. They just went and did a job, did the best they could, and came home. That's what our soldiers are doing now. There aren't many big victories (there were, but only for about two weeks), at least none that get reported, but neither are there defeats, or worse, victories that get reported as defeats. It's a workmanlike effort, a job that needs doing, so we do it.

It's almost like we've grown up as a country.

You can see this very well in the movies. WWII era movies are bloodless, heroic fairy tales. They aren't really about the war in any real sense. The war is a backdrop for John Wayne to make speeches. Not that these movies are bad, immoral, or fattening. They aren't. But they do very well reflect the ethos of the time, that the war was a good thing, a noble cause, and those that fought in it were to be honored and admired.

Fast forward to the 70s and 80s, and you get movies like Apocalypse Now and Platoon, which seem to have as their central character the war itself. The actors are merely foils for the war, powerless to resist its insanity, maimed and disfigured physically and emotionally by the senselessness of it. This, too, reflects an ethos and a public perception. It also reflects the contempt of many for the men that fought in Vietnam, though I should say there are many places and many people that rejected this contempt and held the fighting men in great esteem despite an avalanche of negative press. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the hopelessness of these movies was born out of a similar public hopelessness, and a rejection of the WWII sanitization of the war.

Today we have something very different. On our airport concourses, we have people applauding our soldiers as they return home. We have entire neighborhoods ablaze in yellow ribbons. We have bands and tributes again, as we once did.

And yet, am I the only one that feels there might be something different about it all? We have heroic war movies again, like before, but Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, while inspiring, in no way gloss over the horror that war brings to those that endure it. And yet, they still do inspire, not in spite of the horror, but in an odd way because of it.

I offer yesterday's church service as an example, that perhaps can illustrate what I mean. We had several addresses by former soldiers and the spouses of current ones. All said essentially the same thing, that they were proud of the service they rendered and were glad for the opportunity to serve their country. And all said something like this: "this is incredibly hard. It is extremely dangerous, and we don't take for granted that we'll be coming home. War is an awful thing, but there are things that are more awful, and ingratitude and cowardice are two of those things."

What I hear from the tributes and paeans of praise for our troops in this day and age is an almost adult understanding of the true meaning of the sacrifice being made on our behalf. Oh, there's still bravado and bombast in some quarters, as there is whining and self-pity, hopelessness and defeatism. But by and large, the majority of the country seems to have harnessed itself to the idea that there are noble deeds being done by ordinary men and women every day, and that those deeds should make us grateful that there are such men and women to do them.

America is home to not one great generation, but many. The first, perhaps, we took a bit for granted. The second we unfairly judged. This one, now, this one we see more clearly. They are heroes. Not Olympian heroes, without flaw or pain, but true heroes in the truest sense, men and women of extraordinary character and resolve, who make sacrifices on our behalf not out of necessity, as the previous generations did, but out of gratitude and a sense of duty. These are volunteers, not draftees. Is there any way to entirely comprehend the miracle of that?

We have grown up, as a people, and that is hopeful. I doubt we can ever appreciate in any completeness the miracle we witness every day. We benefit from it now in obvious ways, but we will reap the rewards of it for generations to come. This is an investment that will pay huge dividends for those that made it, and for the rest of us that are their comrades, if not in arms, then at least in spirit.

It is perhaps the most hopeful thing I've seen in my 40 years on this earth.

Happy Independence Week.

How Bad is the Offside Rule?

I promised Alison Wonderland that I'd post on this topic, so here we go:

the soccer offside rule is the stupidest rule in sports.

Honestly, folks, this isn't even close.

First, no other rule in any sport requires the referee to be watching three things at the same time; in this case, the single ref on the playing field has to be watching the ball to see when it is played, the most-forward offensive player, and the entire opposing defense. Best-case, that's three things in an area about the size of a basketball court; worst case, it's three things spread over almost an acre.

Second, it's the only rule in sports that penalizes one team for the actions of the opposing team. When the defense moves in football, the offense doesn't get a penalty for it. Lots of sports have offside rules, including football and rugby, but in those sports, the defense cannot make the offense offside.

Third, and most damning, it's a rule that makes no intrinsic sense. It's just stapled onto a really good game for the purpose of restricting scoring. It's exactly like adding a rule to basketball allowing the Celtics to stop Kobe from scoring by having all their players run off the floor when Kobe gets the ball, forcing him to shoot from 40 feet instead of passing the ball to Lamar Odom for a dunk. How stupid is this?

Purists say that getting rid of the offside rule would ruin the game, but they can't agree on how. Some say scoring would skyrocket but fail to explain how that would be bad, except for the Italians. Others say that scoring would fall (not sure how that's possible, really), because teams would put all their players in front of their goal. But both contentions are founded on nothing much but guesswork, since as far as I know nobody has ever tested it.

I think scoring would rise, and rise dramatically, but not because there would be a huge number of long-bomb goals to cherry-picking forwards. In the same way that a team's scoring rises in football when it has a deep-receiver threat, scoring in soccer would rise. Even the best deep receiver doesn't get more than one or two deep balls a game, but his presence allows a lot more play in front of him by expanding the area the defense has to cover. The best players on the field are usually the central midfielders (look for the number 10), who would all of a sudden gain much larger spaces to work magic in. What kills the game is that offside allows 8 defenders to congregate at the top of the penalty box and shut down Ronaldino with sheer numbers; getting rid of the offside rule would not allow them to do that. The magical, miracle moments we fans love so much would come every 5 minutes, not every half hour.

We'll never see it. Even when Italy puts on a ridiculous display in a major international tournament, embarrassing themselves and international soccer, we're not going to hear calls for getting rid of this cancerous growth on the beautiful game (the offside rule, not Italy itself).

Too bad.

Firefox 3.0!!! WOOHOOO!

Firefox 3.0 is out, and it's absolutely fantastic, so go here and download it right now. I am in fact blogging in my browser window thanks to a great little add-on called ScribeFire. This will enable much more frequent, though not more intelligent, posting.

That's all for now.

Life Can Be a Dream

And I don't mean that in a good way.

I find that here we are in June, and I spent most of the year worrying about if I could financially make it this far. Guess what? I did. Hoorah.

Now I'm worried about September. This is pointless and stupid. [as an aside, one of my friends says he knows worrying works, because look at the huge number of things that never happened because he was worrying about them] [hey, I'm just saying]

Meantime, my kids are growing up, the weather is beautiful - this is the first Spring I can remember here that is actually a lot like Spring - and I'm missing most of it because I'm thinking of other stuff. Yoda inveighs against this when he first meets Luke Skywalker: "always his mind on the future. Hmph. Never his mind on where he was. Hmph. What he was doing." Wise observation from Yoda (aren't they all). This isn't a good thing to be doing. Joy cannot be captured this way.

And men are that they might have joy. That can be read two ways. The usual way is to read it as "men are allowed to be happy", but you can also read it as "the whole point of men is that they be happy". That's the way we're going to read it today. The whole point of all this is for us to be happy. There are 8 million reasons for us to be happy, too, but of course we're going to find the two reasons - illusions, mere potentialities, most of the time - that we might not be, and focus on those. Always our minds on the future, and never our mind on where we are and what we are doing. One cannot be grateful that way, and joy is impossible without gratitude.

That's the way most of us choose to waste our time. I know I do. Time can be converted, banked, laid up in store. We can take it with us. But we can't do it unless we are storing it up as it happens, really experiencing the minutes and hours we have, and extracting from them the joy and the pain and the sorrow and the laughter that is in them. We are admonished to become as little children. That's what kids do best. They are right here, all the time. You never catch a six-year-old losing the joy of the moment because Dad might not get a paycheck next month.

That would be stupid. Who can live in next month?