After just penning a bit of a blistering screed on the subject of being presumed honest and innocent rather than the other way round, I knew the notes I planned on hitting in this annual Memorial Day post where we remember those who sacrificed greatly for the rest of us to have first-world problems like resenting the presumption of dishonesty.
Every day for me is Memorial Day as I look up at that triangular wooden case sitting serenely atop the television cabinet between the metal flying eagle and the silver coloured cross that Dad had bought for a fiver so that his unit’s chaplain could have a properly decorated space in which to conduct his weekly services.
Even when I’m not in the living room, his legacy is rarely far away.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned from time to time that growing up with my father was not a particularly easy thing to do.
Being part of a military family that is being moved from place to place every three years or so (or more often!) is not an easy row to hoe at the best of times. Add to that a rather unpleasant divorce and then navigating the treacherous politics of military life as a single parent with dependents in units that often considered those to be liabilities rather than assets and you can start to imagine the stress we were constantly feeling.
Stress comes at you in so many ways from so many directions and truth be told, it was honestly a miracle that there wasn’t more strife and disagreements between us than there were.
But no matter how many hurt or angry feelings there would be after the latest disagreement that often ended in a practical application of “I swore an oath to defend democracy but I have no desire to practise it!”, there was one unshakeable aspect of my father’s character and personal that I never…ever…had the desire or ability to ever question.
No matter the situation…you never had any doubt whatsoever where he stood on the issue du jour.
For him, honour and the kept word were the two anchors of his universe and they were never going to be moved or broken.
If he made a promise, it was kept without hesitation.
That wasn’t exactly comforting if what he promised you boded ill for you but at least you didn’t have the additional problem of doubting him at his word.
If you want to know the heart of the reason I am so angry with pretty much everyone in what passes for our “government” right now on both sides of the aisle who have played economic chicken with the rest of the world by even allowing them to *DOUBT* that the debts our country has incurred will be paid…that’s it.
The idea of not paying a debt lawfully and honourably incurred was so alien to my father that he could never have imagined the possibility, much less actually failed to make good on that debt and often with far more interest than was originally bargained.
I can only imagine just how horrified he’d be with the profligate spending of unimaginable sums of money by both the Republicans and the Democrats in the near decade on from his passing.
If there was anyone who exemplified the old joke about being like a car that not only could turn on a dime but was cheap enough to pick it up, it was him. It was a rare letter where he wasn’t detailing how he’d managed to walk out of Target or Wal-mart with some items that through a clever stacking of coupons meant that they actually paid him to take the items off his hands. It didn’t matter that he didn’t actually *NEED* the items in question.
I’m thinking of the couple hundred liters of pop he loaded into Moby Dodge the Great White Whale after one particularly successful coupon raid that ended up being stacked like bottles of wine under the counter for us to discover after he left us!
So yes, I remember how much I dreaded the announcement of the President du jour’s budget which was dead on arrival in Congress who would then take the budget and make it far worse and ridiculous and utterly bereft of anything approaching fiscal sanity. Almost certainly within the week, I’d have a letter detailing the line items that particularly piqued his ire and anger at their foolish spending like drunken lords on a massive bender of money we didn’t have that was borrowed from China.
But as much as I knew that storm would blow through and he’d eventually resign himself to the inevitability of the out-of-control government spending until the next Federal fiscal mother of all bombs would be deployed upon the citizenry, I knew that his expectation was once the money was budgeted and spent and the inevitable debt incurred…it would be paid.
Maybe in a hundred years or so but it would be paid.
The honour of our country and the ideals enshrined in our Constitution and those who swore to defend both country and that magnificent document and those who gave their lives in the service of this country demanded nothing less.
I can imagine the seething rage that most people would have only seen by him speaking very calmly and carefully at low volume that any of the politicians (none of whom he had any real use for!) would *DARE* risk the honour and good name of our country for to do so would invite doubt in the rest of the world that when the United States says it will do a thing, that thing will be done come hell or high water.
There is a reason our currency is the reference currency for the world…we pay our bills on time.
Always.
We always have and we always will.
(OK, we also don’t artificially monkey with the valuation of the dollar…at least not directly. Other countries and creditors like that too but it’s the paying the bills on time and in full they like the most. Just saying… 🙂 )
The moment the rest of the world finds a reason to not trust our country to do that is the moment the world economy is effectively finished (and truth be told, that’s probably the least of our worries…the moment the world cannot trust that the United States will back up whatever it says or does, the anarchy that will come soon after will be a bloody one indeed).
That’s why I resent the hyper-partisan terrorists holding our country hostage to their demands using the threat of our country not paying our debts that were lawfully incurred to extract political gain as having taken a step *WAY* too far over the line.
And I resent that President Biden felt beholden to negotiate with these political terrorists.
The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.
United States Constitution, Amendment XIV Section 4
Last time I checked, each and every one of them swore or affirmed an oath to preserve, protect, and defend that document against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
That means all of the parts of that magnificent document, even the ones that inconveniently remind them that if they order the steak and eat the steak, then they bloody well have to pay for the steak.
To do one iota less is to utterly defile and defame and cheapen the the memory of the sacrifice of every hero who voluntarily took upon the service to their country that lay in repose just across the Potomac River or wherever their final resting place may be.
It appears that there is an agreement in principle to avert this fiscal and political disaster and kick the can a bit further down the road and the usual gang of nutters who want to derail that compromise.
But we need to get to back to the notion that the national debt that is incurred shall not be questioned ever again.
By all means, I’d love for Congress to show some measure of fiscal restraint because goodness knows there’s billions of dollars of waste and pork barrel projects that would be better served in paying down that debt so that the generations to follow don’t have to suffer economic catastrophe from the out-of-control debts our generation incurred.
I don’t imagine there’s anyone in Washington who has the backbone to bring fiscal sanity back to the Federal budget and procurement processes. Not when there’s so much money sloshing about that somehow manages to find its way into the pockets of the people who would have to vote for that sort of responsible budgeting and governance.
In this hyper-partisan and polarised society that seems to be getting worse and nastier by the day?
You’ve got a better chance of telling the sun to orbit round the Earth and have it actually come to pass!
What “we the people” can do is make it patently clear to the politicians on both sides of the aisle that they’d best never pull a stunt like this “debt ceiling crisis” again or we’ll chuck them out in favour of people who actually care about the American people who our brave soldiers sought to defend so that we may enjoy the freedoms they purchased with the dearest coin we have.
Honour and the kept word.
That seems a worthy thing for the politicians to think upon this Memorial Day.
It’d be a very welcome change from what passes for thought from that lot on the average day.