On veterans’ day in November, I went to get groceries and there was a giant crane in the middle of the grocery store parking lot with a Hulk-sized American flag hanging from it. A saggy flag presented in the tackiest way possible. In the store, there was a veterans’ breakfast with a live musician singing Jimmy Buffet covers, causing a migraine-inducing dissonance as the overhead PA music still played.

I am a veteran. I hate this shit so much. For years I would fix my smile when they say “thank you for your service”, as meaningless a reflex as the thoughts and prayers offered up for dead school children. Now I tend to keep it to myself. If they’d ask, they would have learned that I spent most of my military service in Germany standing outside the motor pool smoking my Lord cigarettes or standing out in the woods on guard duty with my M16 having a smoke (man, I miss smoking).

I didn’t used to be this way. As a 17-year old Army recruit, I believed in god, guns, and country. My eyes would well up whenever I heard “America, the Beautiful”, my heart would swell just a little during “The Star-Spangled Banner”. But the Army took care of that. It taught me that authoritarianism didn’t care for the likes of me, as a person or a woman. I got meaner and tougher, but not wiser. I learned to speak the language of ass-kicking to cover up the fact that as a human I was diminished. By the end of my enlistment, I’d rejected the arrogance of hegemony, the fetishism of weapons, posturing machismo, and conservatism.

Religion didn’t survive my twenties either. The final nail after a decade of doubts was a course in Middle East history. The Egyptian rulers changed gods to serve their political purposes. It hit me that religion was comprised of fictional narratives constructed by imperfect men. Through this lens, everything made sense to me. All the othering of women, the constant threats of a fiery hell – it was a narrative told entirely for the benefit of a dominant few.

Raised and baptized as a Seventh-Day Adventist, I was a kid who knew the King James Bible inside and out. I prayed for my stepfather to stay sober. I prayed that I would get new shoes. I prayed that the Second Coming/Rapture would not leave me behind. But the more I learned of and experienced the suffering of the world, the more difficult I found it to believe that some god would stand by and allow for this. It didn’t make sense to me and still doesn’t. As an aside, I don’t like the representatives of atheism either – they carry the same whiffs of misogyny and arrogance as any religion.

Since I look like I’d ask for the manager or make 911 calls on people living while black, and I know how to cook a Sunday hot dish as well as anybody, I live in a world where I’m passing. Because people will say all manner of things if they think you’re one of their kind. Sometimes the assumptions are too much and I quietly say it all aloud. Not Christian. Not patriotic. Hate guns. Your opinion is not supported by evidence. I want a world where everyone can be who they are AND be treated with decency and kindness. And this isn’t to say I’m egalitarian AF and everyone is my friend. I have no patience for incurious people and I’m an introspective introvert. I’m not going to join a club. And after this post, I’ll likely not be invited.

I think about that phrase modeling behavior everyday. In the Army, it was lead by example. What expectations do I have of myself? How do I want to be in the world? What am I leaving in my wake? How can I talk compassion and kindness when I’m often all for silence and solitude?

Like most humans, I’m a walking contradiction. Knowing this serves as a reminder to me that everyone else is too. Perhaps this is how we change the world – by not defining each other through the lens of a single characteristic or belief or exchange. The public discourse has gotten so lazy and vitriolic that we see each other in shorthand, with labels. I have to challenge myself constantly to re-frame, re-frame, re-frame when my knee jerk reaction is to see someone in caricature. I screw up, I start over, I ask questions. It’s redemption without the dogmatism.

We live on this planet together even though we spend a whole lot of energy pretending we don’t, pretending that we won’t all suffer from our aggregate destruction of earth. So today like every other day, I start over again. With curiosity. With humility. With the idea that there is so much more to learn. With the belief that I don’t really know you, so I need to listen. With the understanding that I am not always correct, always kind, always compassionate. But I will try to be better at it. This is my prayer, my salute, my warrior stance, my supplication…