if you don’t vote, you suck

Posted on October 30, 2014 by greg

I really enjoy voting. I enjoy the process — going to my local polling place on election day, standing in line with other voters, seeing the volunteers, buying a treat from whatever local school or church or charity group has set up a table outside the polling place. It makes me feel connected to the community. It makes me feel all citizeny. It makes me feel patriotic.

But this year I’m not doing it. Oh, I’m voting. In fact, I’ve already voted. I voted a couple of weeks ago. This year I voted by absentee ballot. Why the change? Curiosity. I wanted to see what it was like. I’ve never voted with an absentee ballot before.

Here are some of the things I discovered about voting absentee. First, it’s dead easy. The ballot comes right to your door, you open it, fill it out, follow the instructions, send it back in. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. You can do it while drinking your morning coffee. You can do it in your pajamas. Of course, you can go to your local polling place in your pajamas too, if you want — it’s a free country.

Second, I feel like I did a better job of voting. When I vote in person there are usually some candidates for local office that are complete cyphers to me. I’ve no idea who they are or what they stand for. Offices like the Public Hospital Board or the Soil and Agriculture Commission. I didn’t even know there was a Soil and Agriculture Commission. But with a ballot in front of me and a computer at hand, I was able to make a more informed vote for the Soil and Agriculture Commission (I voted for the former nun — you can never go very wrong voting for a former nun; they have a moral center that informs their decisions, but they also have whatever doubts that sparked them to jack the wimple).

Third, I learned the Secretary of State is pretty damned anal compulsive when it comes to filling out the ballot. You have to use a black ink pen. No blue ink, no green ink, and sure as hell no red ink (what, are you some sort of commie?). Also, you have to fill in the oval completely. No check marks, no Xs, no smiley faces (this ain’t high school). You fail to follow the instructions, your vote gets scrapped.

Finally, I learned that vote security is fairly tight. After you fill out the ballot, you put it in an envelope labeled Secrecy Envelope, and seal the envelope. The Secrecy Envelope is then placed in an Affidavit Envelope, which you have to sign and date and seal that as well. The Affidavit Envelope is then placed in the Return Envelope, which also has to be sealed. All of these envelopes are the old-fashioned lick-and-seal type, not the fancy new remove-a-strip-and-press type. If you want to vote Absentee, you have to be willing to sacrifice a lot of saliva.

Drop the envelope in the mail, and you’ve done your civic duty. It’s not as viscerally fulfilling as going to your polling place and doing it (and by ‘it’ I mean voting) in the privacy of the voting booth, but it’s really that easy. So why do so few people do it?

In Iowa, during presidential election years, about 74% of registered voters actually vote. That’s not great, but it’s almost 15% higher than the national average. Voter participation drops rather dramatically in midterm elections. Only about 54% of registered Iowans vote, which is still better than the national average of around 38%. Only a third to a half of all registered voters cast a ballot in the midterm elections. That’s pretty damned pathetic.

Sure, election campaigns are frustrating and annoying. I totally get that. Sure, attack advertising turns off voters. And sure, we’ll all be glad when we don’t have to see another campaign advert on television. And sure, we’ll all be glad when the election is over. But will we be glad about the result?

Here’s the thing: if you don’t vote, you suck. I don’t care how discouraged you are — if you don’t vote, you suck. I don’t care what your reasons are for not voting — if you don’t vote, you suck. You suck as a citizen. If you don’t vote, you don’t get to call yourself a patriot. If you don’t vote, you deserve whatever shitty government you get. If you don’t vote, then fuck you in the neck.

It’s SO easy to vote. So easy, and so important. And if you can’t be bothered to vote, then you suck. It’s that simple. Don’t suck. Go vote.

warm boot

Posted on September 15, 2014 by greg

Ninety percent of the work I do takes place in my head. The other ten percent involves shifting that work from my head to the computer through my fingers. Because so much of my work involves the creative writing of other folks, I spend a lot of time thinking about odd stuff, asking myself odd questions, researching odd topics.

Example? Sure, here’s one. Last week, I found myself exploring the history, function, and evolution of the lapel — complete with tangents on why we only see peaked lapels on formal evening wear, and the sad decline of the boutonnière loop on the reverse of the lapel. Here’s another issue I dealt with last week: at what point, in a science fiction mystery set in a massive orbiting space colony, does the number of sapient species living in the colony cease to create the illusion of the diversity of life in the known universe and begin to become a distraction from the story?

Where the gravel road intersects the line of trees is a bridge spanning a river.

I do most of this thinking and wondering and questioning and researching in a small office with a window that looks out on a deeply uninteresting suburban street. I periodically shift to the kitchen table, where the windows look out on some deeply uninteresting suburban back yards. The absence of anything visually interesting is usually a good thing; it makes it easier to stay inside my head, where almost everything is interesting.

But I also need to regularly reset my brain, so once or twice a week I either bang into the city or I go lounge around the countryside — which I tend to think of as either a cold boot or a warm boot (do people even use those terms anymore to describe different levels of rebooting a computer?). The city is a cold boot. A complete re-start. The countryside is a warm boot. Restarting without going through the rigorous Power On Self Test.

Jameson and Peanut

A couple of days ago I did a warm boot. Got in the car late one afternoon, went looking for a bridge over a river. Any bridge, any river. It’s really a pretty easy task. There are rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams all over the Midwest. The same with roads. At some point all those roads have to intersect with all those rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams. And that means a bridge.

Fifteen — maybe twenty — minutes later I was standing on a classic steel truss bridge spanning the South Skunk River. These used to be pretty common bridges; easy to build, practical, sturdy. They began making them out of wood in the 1870s, moved to cast iron a few decades later, then to steel in the early 1900s. Engineers still make various forms of truss bridge, but these old steel units on secondary or gravel roads are gradually being replaced by safer, more easily built, less expensive (and much less interesting) concrete beam bridges.

Perfectly understandable from a governance perspective. But it’s still rather sad. There’s simply no romance in a concrete beam bridge. No struts on which Peanut and Jameson can record their love.

Skunk River

It’s a nice river though, the South Skunk. Hundred and eighty-five miles long. Add another ninety-five miles after it joins up with the North Skunk and they both meander down into the Mississippi.

It’s not actually named for skunks, by the way. Back in the mid-17th century when the French coureurs de bois and voyageurs were wandering around in the wilderness, they often (and I mean seriously often) failed to properly translate the names given to local geographical landmarks by the native peoples. The local Sauk and Meskwaki tribes told the French explorers that the river was Chicaqua, a term meaning ‘having a powerful smell.’ The Indians were apparently referring to the onions that grew wild along the banks. But since they’d also used the same term in describing skunks…well, there it is. The Skunk River.

Long and straight, heading due east.

I noodled around on the bridge for a while, no longer thinking about aliens or the sociology of fashion, then got back in the car and headed farther upriver. But this is the Midwest, and the roads rarely follow the course of geological features. The secondary highways and gravel roads are long and straight, laid out east-west and north-south on a grid.

That’s the work of Thomas Jefferson. I don’t mean to suggest Jefferson was out in Iowa with a surveyor’s theodolite (that’s that little telescope-looking thing). It’s just that he came up with the concept of the Public Land Survey System. After the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. government needed to raise some cash, and find a way to reward the soldiers who’d fought. The solution was pretty obvious: there was a whole lot of land unoccupied by white folks — give it to the troops.

But first that new land had to be surveyed. It took years to actually implement the system. It wasn’t until white folks began to ‘civilize’ Ohio that the government began to apply the system. It’s really pretty simple. They established east-west baselines and north-south meridians, divided the territory into square townships (never mind if there were any actual towns there yet), made each township six miles by six miles, divided the townships into thirty-six sections of 640 acres each, set aside one section (always Section 16) for a school, and when it came time to lay down roads all they had to do was follow the grid.

Canoe access farther up the South Skunk.

Which is what I did. I followed the grid. A couple of miles east, eight miles north, a few miles west, cross over the soulless, ugly little concrete beam bridge, and there’s the river. With a canoe access marker, telling me how far downriver the next canoe access point is.

The brain is rebooted. I go home and the problem with the alien species saturation point seems a lot more clear. Later when a friend asked “How was your day?” I replied, “It was busy.” “Yeah? What did you do?”

And really, what could I say? I drove on roads laid out on principles designed by the third President of the United States, and stood on a bridge probably built during the Depression of the 1930s over a river mis-named by French explorers a hundred years before Thomas Jefferson was born — all to distract myself from thinking about aliens and lapels.

Instead I said “I went for a drive and thought about some stuff.” Which sparked a long, long silence during which I swear I could hear my friend thinking “What? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s what you call busy?”

“And I made my final selections for my fantasy football team,” I said. That seemed to satisfy him.

uncomfortable confessional crap

Posted on August 21, 2014 by greg

You know, you get so used to your life that sometimes you fail to recognize how odd it is. Or how odd it seems to other people.

I was reminded of this recently. It was a pretty ordinary situation; I was with a friend in a dimly-lit hallway and there was a bit of light peeking out from beneath a closed door. I must have hesitated a bit before opening the door. Well, no, I know I hesitated a moment. I always do.

“What was that about?” my friend asked.

“What was what about?”

“That pause before you opened the door.”

I don’t talk about myself very often. I don’t really spend much time thinking about myself. I’m not very self-reflective. I’ve lived with myself my entire life, so there’s nothing really new there for me to learn. I’m aware that other people don’t hesitate before opening a door that has a light shining underneath it — but it doesn’t occur to me that it’s odd that I do it.

But when somebody else notices it, you sort of have to explain. And how do you do that? How do you tell somebody that when you approach a door in a dimly-lit hallway — a door with a light shining underneath it — that you hesitate because you always remember opening a similar door with a similar light and finding a dead guy hanging from a pipe? How do you do that without sounding all dramatic?

Because it’s really not dramatic. There’s just a moment — and seriously, it’s just a very brief moment — when you have to suppress an old spark of fear. I know I’m not going to open that door and see a dead guy hanging from a pipe. But my brain always says “Okay, prepare yourself for something horrible, then open the door.” And I open it and everything is okay.

I was a medic in the military. For most of my military career I was assigned to a large medical center, in a unit called Special Functions. I was part of a team that responded primarily to respiratory and cardiac emergencies. Most of what we did took place within the medical center; cardiac arrests, respiratory arrests, that sort of thing. But sometimes we’d be sent out on ambulance runs.

I don’t recall what sparked this particular run; somebody must have assumed there was a living person in some sort of respiratory distress. But there wasn’t. We responded to a hotel where somebody from the base worked part-time on a maintenance crew. The hotel staff directed us to the basement. Some sort of heating and air-conditioning facility.

So…dimly-lit hallway, light shining out from under the door.

The guy had been dead for a few days. All the bodily fluids had drained to his extremities, so his arms and legs were bloated and dark purple. His neck had stretched about a foot, so his feet were almost touching the floor. We were afraid that if we cut him down, the impact would cause his bloated feet to explode, so another medic and I had to support him while a third cut the — I don’t recall if it was a rope or a belt or a cord. Whatever he’d hung himself with. And, of course, there was the stink of putrefaction.

The whole event was pretty ghastly, but really it was just one of a number of ghastly things I’ve seen or done. I won’t say you get used to ghastly stuff, but you do become sort of inured to it. There have been other experiences that gave me nightmares for years, but that wasn’t one of them.

And yet I still flash on the image when I’m in a dimly-lit hallway and I see light under a doorway. To me, it’s not a big deal. Explaining it to somebody, though, is sort of embarrassing. Not because of what happened, but because of the way they look at you.

My friend said “You should talk about that stuff. You should write about it. Maybe you’ll get over it. Put it behind you.” So I said I would, because that was the easiest thing to say.

But here’s the thing: why would I want to put it behind me? Ugly things happen. They happen to everybody. I don’t want to forget them. I don’t mind that the memory of ugly things sometimes cause some minor disruption in my life. Ugly things are supposed to cause some disruption.

I know now what I should have said to my friend: “I still open the door. I always open the door. I’ll keep opening the door.” Because as long as you can open the door, that’s really all that matters.

my morning, interrupted

Posted on August 16, 2014 by greg

So I’m sitting here, right? It’s 9:30 on a Saturday morning, I’m drinking a cup of cold brew, looking out the window at drizzly-cloudy day, getting ready to read my students’ work. And the doorbell rings.

Guy in a suit. Young guy, white, earnest glasses, unsmiling. Right, Jehovah’s Witness. I open the door, he mutters something, hands me a pamphlet, and turns away. I didn’t even get a chance to say ‘Good morning.’ Not much of a witness — but hey, it’s 9:30 on a Saturday morning and it’s drizzly-cloudy. Who can blame him for wanting to finish his chores and go find a dry place where he can get a cup of…do Jehovah’s Witnesses drink coffee?

Where can we find answers to life’s big questions? The pamphlet seems to suggest we can find them on our smartphone. Android phone, by the looks of it. Sorry, Siri. But what ARE life’s big questions? They’re listed on the back. Which of these big questions concerns you most? They’re not the questions I would have asked. Which is maybe one of the many reasons I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness.

What is the meaning of life?

Is God to blame for our suffering?

What happens when you die?

I’m a tad disturbed by the way the last two questions are phrased. Is God to blame for OUR suffering, and what happens when YOU die. Our suffering, your death. They don’t want to come right out and say ‘Dude, we know what’s going to happen when WE die, but you? Different story, bud.’

I don’t know…all I wanted was a cup of cold brew coffee, a few minutes to scan the news, then get my homework out of the way. Now I’m faced with these three questions. Fucking doorbell. Never should have answered the door. Never get out of the boat (no idea why Apocalypse Now popped into my brain).

Okay…meaning of life. I don’t know. Not very concerned about it. Eat well, get to know some interesting people, be curious, help other folks when you can. That ought to do it.

Is God to blame for our suffering? I don’t know. I don’t believe in god. But sure, why not? If you’re going to go to all the fuss and bother of believing in god, you might as well give him something to do. Shoulder the blame–that ought to keep him busy. And everybody who claims to speak for god, let’s hand them a share of the blame too. And let’s give a portion to all those young guys who ring doorbells at 9:30 on a Saturday morning — they sure as hell added to my suffering.

Right, what’s next? Oh…what happens when you die? I don’t know. Does it matter? I mean, regardless of what happens you’re still going to do it. It’s not like it’s optional. I totally get the idea that a lot of folks believe that if you live your life a certain way, then after you’re dead you get to join god’s special club. Like if you practice the clarinet, maybe you’ll get to play with the marching band. Or maybe you’ll just piss away a lot of time playing the clarinet. I don’t know. Can’t get very concerned about it.

By the way, I did a Google image search of ‘god clarinet’ to find a visual to include in this post. So okay, I don’t know the meaning of life and I don’t know what happens when you die, but I think this has to figure into it somehow:

Seriously, you ought to do that image search. Brilliant. And that earnest young man who rang my doorbell this morning? If not for him, I’d have never seen this. Maybe there really is a god and this is his plan.

Her plan.

One of those. Praise Jeebus.

memorial day, maxwell

Posted on May 27, 2014 by greg

I only know a few veterans who give much attention to Memorial Day. I generally don’t. Don’t get me wrong — the concept of Memorial Day is beautiful. Honoring the men and women who’ve died while serving in the military is a worthy idea. But let’s face it, there’s not a lot of actual honoring going on these days. In practice, Memorial Day has become a cheap-ass way for people to ‘support the troops’ without actually having to do anything. It’s a form of emotional absolution; people wave the flag a couple times a year and say ‘Thanks for your service’ to a few folks in uniform, then they’ve done their duty and can go about their lives.

It’s not their fault. Most folks simply don’t have any skin in the game. Since we have a volunteer military, relatively few people have family serving in the armed forces. In fact, I’d suggest most people don’t even know anybody currently serving in uniform. We now have a military force comprised almost entirely of strangers. So it’s understandable that we don’t really care too much about what happens to them.

It saddens me. It annoys me. But it no longer angers me. I totally understand and I can’t really blame anybody for only paying lip service to the troops.

So in order to avoid becoming annoyed with people, I prefer to spend Memorial Day doing something non-Memorial Dayish. But yesterday, on the way from one place to another, I happened to drive through the small town of Maxwell, Iowa. And I mean small town. Population of 920, according to the last census. That’s 920 people total, living in 349 households, and belonging to 242 families.

The main road through Maxwell passes by a cemetery. And there were flags. So I made a U-turn and stopped.

I didn’t even attempt to count them. Let’s just say there were a lot of flags. Not tiny flags, like the ones they hand out at parades or most often seen in cemeteries. These were full-sized flags.

And I was moved, almost to tears. Not because of the flags themselves; the U.S. flag may be a marvel of graphic design, but it’s increasingly being used primarily as a prop. No, I was moved by the effort.

These 920 people went to a great deal of bother to put up those flags. They likely spent a sizable chunk of the town’s tiny budget to buy them. This had to involve a very real sacrifice of time and money on the part of the citizens of Maxwell. A town that small, you know most of the people living there are farmers or have farm-related jobs. I don’t know anything about farming, but it seems like this is a busy time of year for folks who do farm stuff.

But they somehow found the time — no, they made the time — to put up all those flags. Why? Because they thought Memorial Day was worth it. Because they thought we were worth it, all of us who’ve spent time in military harness. Because they think the troops are still worth it.

For the first time in years, Memorial Day meant something to me. It meant something to me because it meant something to the 920 people of Maxwell, Iowa.

things on a table — knuckles dobrovic

Posted on May 23, 2014 by greg

Back in January I wrote about my reluctant conversion to Instagram. I was one of those people who mocked and jeered the app. I was one of those folks who used a camera to shoot photos — not a telephone with integrated camera-like technology. I considered Instagram to be a platform for cheesy photographers to display cheesy snapshots of their feet, or drunken snapshots of their drunken friends at parties, or sappy snapshots of sappy sunsets.

And hey, there really is a LOT of that stuff to be found in Instagram. But when I started to noodle around looking at photos on Instagram, I discovered there was also a surprising amount of really good work. It was because of that work (along with the purchase of a phone with a moderately decent camera) that I decided to dip my toe into the Instagram stream.

22 July, 2013

So in July of last year, I created an Instagram account. I was shy about it. I didn’t want something that could be publicly associated with me, so I used an alias for my account: Knuckles Dobrovic. I conceived a really simple (and let’s face it, really contrived) idea for some Instagram-ish photos: I would put something on a glass patio table, and I’d photograph it.

It was intended to be a lighthearted experiment. I was just going to noodle around and see what the cellphone camera could do, and get some idea of how Instagram worked. I wanted it to be something I could delete without hesitation or regret if/when it became too embarrassing or too dull.

August 3, 2013

What I’d actually done, of course, was unconsciously sabotage the experiment. I didn’t want to like Instagram. And in the earliest photographs, that really showed. I just put any damned thing near to hand on the table — some ears of corn, a baseball, a beer bottle, a random collection of old eyeglasses — and photographed it without much care or concern about the final image.

Sure, there was some minimal attempt at composition, but it remained basically a fairly lackadaisical exercise.

September 19, 2013

At some point, however, the experiment took hold of me. I found myself being more thoughtful and deliberate about the photos. I began to look around to find things that would be more photogenic on the table. I began to compose the shots more carefully. When I was out and about, I began collecting things specifically for the table. I talked about the project to friends and family. I actually began to care about the photographs.

November 4, 2013

Things on a Table became an actual project. Almost every day, I put something on the table and photographed it. I began to vary the time of day I shot the photo so I could use different light and catch different shadows. I photographed things on the table in all sorts of weather. I’d shift the table to different spots on the deck to get different patterns of line, light and shadow.

I even considered taking the table to different locations — out into the country, onto the sidewalk, into the city. That idea got tossed fairly quickly, mainly because it would have been a massive pain in the ass. But the important thing was that I’d begun to set specific parameters for limits on the project.

November 22, 2013

Winter came and snow covered the table, and I still put a thing on it and took a photo. I even began to create ice-things for the table. I’d find a thing, put it in a container, fill the container with water, set it outside and photograph the frozen result. I’d stuff things inside balloons, then fill the balloons with water and let them freeze. I’d shoot the photo, then leave the frozen things on the table and let the snow cover them. Over time the heat of the sun or the force of the wind would gradually reveal them, and I’d photograph them again.

January 9, 2014

To my surprise, friends and family members began gathering assorted bits and bobs of stuff they thought might appeal to me or look good on the table. An odd rock, plastic bubble wrap from a toner cartridge, an interesting weed, a hubcap found along the road. Eventually, people I know only through social media began to mail me things to put on the table.

I began to re-use some of the things — a piece of driftwood, a half a brick, some dead flower blossoms, an ornamental magnifier — partly because I like their shape or texture, and partly because the idea of continuity of things appealed to me.

March 15, 2014

Like any project, this one occasionally feels like a chore. I’ve considered abandoning it two or three times. But each time I’d spot something that might be interesting on the table, and I’d find myself out on the deck trying to find an angle that worked.

At this point I figure I’ll finish out the year. I’ll continue to photograph things on the table into July. Then I’ll probably come up with some other sort of project, simply because I’ve grown fond of the name Knuckles Dobrovic.

April 29, 2014

I realize that’s a stupid reason. I don’t care. I’ve no objection to doing things for stupid reasons. I mean, I’m the guy who came up with the name Knuckles Dobrovic just to photograph random things on a table. Stupid is where I live.

May 23, 2014

impermanence

Posted on March 25, 2014 by greg

So there’s me, on the first day of Spring, noodling around the Riverwalk just as if I didn’t have anything else to do. And man, it felt like Spring. Bright and sunny, almost warm, fresh breeze. Bicyclists were out, and young mothers with strollers, and over the lunch hour all the employed people abandoned their offices and escaped the skywalk and hit the sidewalks with all the energy of spawning salmon.

So yeah, even though I had work that needed to be done, I was out walking. And here’s a true thing: you cannot walk along the Riverwalk without stopping occasionally and peeking over the balustrade to watch the river flow by. While I was doing that, I saw a milky white film of some sort, splashed out on the river. Who knows what it was — soap scum maybe, or chemical waste, or something organic roiled up by the snow melt rushing over the dam upstream. Whatever it was, my immediate reaction was disappointment and a mild distaste at the sight of it.

But then it sort of drew me in. It was almost hypnotic, the way the motion of the river shaped and reshaped the stuff, the way the color shifted with each tiny wave.

I must have watched this happen for a quarter of an hour. I can’t say it was pretty, but there was something compelling about it — something unexpectedly absorbing. The river, I knew, would shrug this stuff off, whatever it was. Even in the short time I was there, I could see the stuff gradually being disrupted by the current — broken up, disorganized, reorganized, and all while being forced inevitably downstream. There wasn’t a single moment when the stuff held a coherent shape.

I realized the only constant in this event was me. I was standing still. I wasn’t moving. I was the only fixed point in an otherwise unfixed occurrence.

So I left.

nobody pays much attention

Posted on November 9, 2013 by greg

In the United States, November 11 is called Veterans Day. In other parts of the world it’s called Remembrance Day or Armistice Day. The latter is appropriate since it celebrates the anniversary of the day hostilities formally ceased in the First World War. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

Ninety-five years. And what have we learned? Aside from more efficient and more impersonal methods for killing, not a hell of a lot. We’re still fighting wars, we’re still fighting them for the same stupid reasons, and at the behest of the same powerful business and political interests. Young men and women are still killing and dying in foreign lands. And nobody is paying much attention.

U.S. Army Pfc. Michael W. Daley Jr. (right) and Pfc. Travis B. Woolwine, both Soldiers with 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), scan their surroundings while on patrol in Paktya Province, Afghanistan / Photo by Sgt. Justin Moeller

U.S. Army Pfc. Michael W. Daley Jr. (right) and Pfc. Travis B. Woolwine, with 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), scan their surroundings while on patrol in Paktya Province, Afghanistan / Photo by Sgt. Justin Moeller

As of this date, 402 troops have died fighting in Afghanistan this year. Most of those (310) were US troops, but soldiers and marines from the UK, from Poland, from Georgia (the former Soviet state), from Romania and Slovakia and Italy and Germany and Australia have also been killed.

In the last few days 42-year-old Warrant Officer Ian Fisher of Barking, Essex in England was killed in an IED attack in Lashkar Gah in Helmund Province. Army Sergeant 1st Class Forrest Robertson, 35 years old, of Westmoreland, Kansas was killed by small arms fire in Pul-i-Alam in Kogar Province — also known as Bab al-Jihad, the Gates of Jihad, because of the savage fighting between Soviet troops and mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. Army Specialist Angel Lopez, 27, from Parma, Ohio was killed by small arms fire in a Green on Blue attack in Zabul Province. Twelve deaths in the first nine days this month. The youngest was 19 years old. Nineteen years old — Jeremiah Collins of Milwaukee wasn’t even old enough to buy a beer. Dead, 7000 miles from home, in service to his country.

US Army Spc. Kevin Jackson, 4th Squadron, 9th Cavalry Regiment, 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, pulls security during a reconnaissance mission in a village south of Forward Operating Base Fenty, Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, Sept. 8, 2013 / Photo by Sgt. Margaret Taylor

All of those troop who’ve died have families and friends, they have fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, they have wives and husbands and children. Outside of their families and friends, hardly anybody will notice those deaths. Because nobody, really, is paying much attention.

I mentioned this earlier in the year. At that point there were about 70,000 US troops serving in Afghanistan; today there are about 60,000. Combat operations by US troops are slated to end in late 2014 — but even then the US will likely leave between 15,000 and 30,000 troops in the region. And be sure of this: some of them will be fighting and dying.

Cpl. Zachery K. Arrowood with 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, provides security during a patrol in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Oct. 12, 2013. The patrol was conducted to disrupt enemy activity in the area / Photo by Lance Cpl. Zachery B. Martin

There’s still only one media outlet that routinely pays attention to the troops serving in combat zones — the liberal muckraking magazine Mother Jones. They still publish their brilliant photo series We’re Still at War: Photo of the Day. I don’t know how many people bother to look at the photos. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

Why? Because the war is primarily being fought by strangers — by people we don’t know and don’t care about. Historically, wars have always been fought primarily by the poor and working class. Officers, of course, usually come from the middle classes, but most of the killing and dying has been done by the underclasses. The demands of twelve years of war — the longest war in US history — have exacerbated that problem. The gap between the people who initiate the wars and the people who actually fight them is greater now than ever before. And the mass in the middle — which includes most of the American public — are estranged from both groups. And so when a soldier gets killed in some dusty desert, very few people are affected, and nobody pays much attention.

Marines and Georgian Soldiers with 33rd Georgian Battalion exit an MV-22 Osprey aircraft during an operation in Helmand province, Afghanistan, Sept. 23, 2013. Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 165 provided the service members with aerial support during the operation / Photo by Cpl. Ashley E. Santy

On Monday — Veterans Day — I’ll meet with my brother and my cousin, both of whom served in the Marines, and we’ll attend a breakfast given by a local grocery store chain (Hy-Vee), just as we’ve done for the last few years. There’ll be a lot of old veterans there — a handful from World War II, a few from Korea, some from Viet Nam and Iraq and Afghanistan. The food will be mediocre — but better than what we’d have gotten in the mess hall back when we were in uniform.

Nobody will be there just for the food. We’ll all be there because we’re veterans, and on this one day some folks will pay attention. Most of the veterans sitting down to breakfast will have scars, physical or emotional. Some will be missing limbs. And every one of us will, at some point, remember somebody who was wounded or killed.

Marines with 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, patrol near Forward Operating Base Musa Qala, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Oct. 19, 2013. The Marines of 3/7 patrolled to reduce enemy activity in the area / Photo by Lance Cpl. James Mast

As we enter and leave the breakfast venue, the volunteers from the grocery store will thank us for our service. And they’ll be sincere, because they’re working people. Some of them will be veterans themselves, or have family members who have served or are still serving. During the day a lot of politicians will also give public thanks for our service. Some of them will be sincere and some of them will mean it. Damned few of them, though, will actually understand what service to the country means. It means sacrifice. When most politicians speak about sacrifice, they’re talking about other people.

On Tuesday the 12th, the world will forget us for another year. Troops in Afghanistan will continue to go out on patrol. Some of them will get wounded. Some will get killed. And nobody will pay much attention.

Editorial note: The photos above were shot by members of the military, and published in Mother Jones magazine.

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