Semper Fi

Have you ever had an accidental shopping buddy? They arrive at the grocery store within minutes of you, and your cruising algorithms fall into step with each other's. Up and down the aisles you go, accidentally winding up in front of the pickles at the same time as each other, simultaneously selecting salad greens and jelly. It is often an interesting glimpse into the life of a complete stranger.

I had a whole family as accidental shopping buddies today: a tall, square shouldered youngish man and his wife, their small daughter, and the woman's sister. The man was a bit loud, and I gathered that he was a recently decommissioned officer, a Marine, home (hopefully for good) recently. He and his wife and sister-in-law were engaging in the plebeian task of grocery shopping, but they were having more fun at it than I have had in a good long time. Although finding myself in the same aisles as them every single time, we were on alternate routes, so our carts crisscrossed each other's about ten or twelve times.

Each pass, I couldn't help but overhear snips of their conversation, patches of laughter seemingly out of place in the sterile red-and-white of our local Meijer. I never caught exactly what was so funny- maybe it was several things- but I did hear them prank calling another relative on their cell phone, then roaring in laughter at the result of this.

In the pasta aisle, something tickled their funnybone so bad that they literally startled the entire aisle of shoppers with their laughter. It wasn't raucous or drunken laughter, just pure fun with a touch of insanity. The man laughed until he had to wipe tears away from his eyes, a full-bodied belly laugh that I can still hear.
I ran into them again, five minutes later, standing in front of the yogurt. The man had just finished another good hearty blowup of hilarity and was once again wiping tears from his eyes. He shook his head, passed a thick hand over the small circle of hair on top of his head, and mumbled the quietest thing I'd heard from him yet:

"God, I hope I don't have to go back."
His wife sobered and put her hand on his arm, her lips white. I grabbed blindly at a container of cottage cheese and darted down another aisle.

I hope he doesn't have to go back either.

I've laughed like that before, and it was only after a particularly nightmarish time in my life. The laughter cleansed the past weeks away, veiled the worries that still lay hidden inside my soul, and drowned memories.

Who knows what horrors that man saw. Who knows what emotion he's been through, what panic greeted him every morning. I don't even know if he was in Iraq. I know nothing about him beyond what I gleaned by accident. All I know is that he is home, and he is safe, and he is healthy. He has his wife and his child back, and a cell phone on which to make prank calls. He has cereal and yogurt and barbeque sauce and cheese and Ziploc bags- synonymous of normalcy. He has laughter that masks any terror that he might not be able to talk about yet.

Wherever you are, belly-laughing decommissioned Marine: I thank you for your service to this country. I don't agree with the war anymore, haven't for a few years now, but I appreciate each and every person who has trudged through the sand and mud and sun to honor the commitments that they made.
I hope that you come back safe, with your families and your world intact.
I hope that this nightmare ends soon and none of you have to go back over there, ever.
And I hope that when you come home, that you are able to laugh just a little bit softer, knowing that there are no terrors to drown out any more.

A Culture of Arrogance

There is something horrible in our world today. It has been bothering me lately, niggling at the back of my mind, wanting explanation.

Today, I (somewhat) sorted it out. I was dealing with a rather difficult pair of customers, and I tend to sum people up as I'm listening to them. The only word that I could hear in my mind was:

"Arrogant!"

.... which they were. The man had the audacity to think that I would repair, for free, a watch that he had purchased elsewhere, the woman demanded the use of one of our tools that was sitting out of her reach, and together they accounted for my worst customer experience of this week.

I drove home behind a pick-up truck labeling me as an obscenity if I didn't appreciate that particular driver's mode of traveling.

After work, I watched a short newsclip in which an unnamed eyebrowless presidential candidate shot off his mouth about something or other, all the while wearing this grin that made my teeth set on edge.

Later that evening I indulged in my usual guilty pleasure of reading all of the help columns, such as Dear Abby, Annie's Mailbox, and Dear Margo. Something about reading the sob stories of others makes my own pathetic life seem not quite so wretched. One story after another marches across my weary vision, stories of broken marriages, ungrateful children, and unrepentant family members. Not one person is taking blame for an ugly situation, they all want to pin it on others and make them pay for their suffering.

We are living in an age of arrogance. Pride- not the good kind- mocks us from the covers of magazines, brazenly struts across our television and computer screens, and taunts us from every media outlet imaginable. We have come so far from humility that generations of children do not even know what humility is.

People in this day abuse power and laugh over it, steal other peoples' jobs, spouses, and assets and feel no shame, and admit not a single shortcoming or character flaw. To be selfish is good, to be arrogant is normal. How have we allowed society to degrade this way?

I know that arrogance is nothing new. Many evils throughout history have been perpetrated solely from sheer pride. But I really feel that it is becoming epidemic. No one puts misbehaved children in their place anymore, and the children grow up into rebellious monsters. No one takes responsibility for screw-ups anymore, and the liability lawsuit industry costs industrialized nations billions of dollars a year. People allow themselves to have a roving eye- I personally have heard women say that they deserve to cheat on a loving spouse- and the divorce rates soar.

What has happened to us? Is it the shift from religion to humanism? Humanism is a self-centric philosophy, whereas religion tends to be theistic, centering on one or more beings, or others. Humanism is actually, in my opinion, the religion of self, of mankind. How can one project compassion- genuinely- onto another when all one has at heart is the good of himself? Maybe this is not a good theory, for I find arrogance to be almost more prevalent among religious people than anyone else lately. But look at our churches now- rather than preach contrition and absolution, we preach self-esteem and affirmation. We are a people fat on the empty praise of our culture, drunk on the insignificant contributions we have made to our little selfish worlds.

Arrogance strips us of true compassion, blinds us to the faults within ourselves, and sears our consciences. Arrogance is as much in the soul of the unrepentant criminal as it is in the smiling politician on your television.

I don't have a solution to offer. The only thing that I can do is try to remember to be humble, to raise my girls free of the 'princess' mindset, and to do as much good for others as I can in this short life. The only thing that I can hope to impact the world through is this measly blog posting. And I say this to you- as much for me as for anyone- check yourselves for pride today. Search your heart and try to weed out any thought that puts you above another human being. Learn to serve, learn to be quiet, learn to not mock. Find meekness, find humility.

I'll be right there beside you, and maybe together we'll learn how to make the world a little bit better of a place.