Inside and Outside

Here’s another interesting fact about military bases, such as the ones I grew up on:  they’re a finite size and enclosed.  That gives them something in common with a ghetto.

I’ve already described how my family could buy most of what they needed “on base.”  We could buy food, other products, and entertainment on base, much of it within walking distance.

From the age of six to the age of fifteen—with a year and a half or so gap—I lived on air force bases, although my father was a civilian.

When I was a teenager living on base—this was in Japan—I would take long walks every day after school.  Some of these walks would take me along the southwest boundaries of the base.  I would look at the fence that ran around the base and think about how I was inside the base and the area on the other side of the fence was outside.  There wasn’t really anything to see; most of that area was dense tree and shrubbery.

It wasn’t that I particularly thought of the “outside” as being somehow threatening compared to the “inside.”  Or that I thought the people “inside” were better than the people “outside.”  I just was aware of the division.  Perhaps if I had been older, and actually a member of the military, I would have thought so.

One gets used to how one is raised.  When I lived with the military (but still a civilian) in Germany, it felt very odd at first.  Although my family lived with the U.S. Army, in our own “American” area, we were not sealed off by a fence.  My mother and I never did learn why that was.  The “campus” where I spent my first two years of college—in Munich, Germany—had once been a German military establishment—a caserne—but had been taken over by the U. S. after World War II.  It could have easily been sealed off (and probably once was).  At home with my parents in Nuremberg, it felt odd to not be “protected” by a fence around our American area.  In Munich it didn’t feel so odd—being a college campus, it seemed set off anyway.

I think I have carried this notion of being “sealed off” with me since my childhood.  One of the results of being separated is that you can easily ignore what is “outside” the base perimeter.  However, if you become aware of this tendency, you can overcome it—although you then become aware of how the people around you limit themselves.  

Perhaps that is what happened to me.

Another Thanksgiving, Taken Personally

So now we in the United States end another Thanksgiving weekend, in the odd way we have recently evolved for doing this. 

First of all, Thanksgiving itself has a convoluted history.  We’re taught that it all goes back to the Pilgrims who settled in Massachusetts in the early 1600s, how they gathered with the natives to give thanks for the food they all had (some Virginians claim the first event of this nature actually happened at Jamestown some years ahead of the event at Plymouth).  Later, of course, the European colonists expanded west decimating the native peoples and cultures.  

The official national celebration, however, originated with Abraham Lincoln in the aftermath of the great Civil War battle of Gettysburg, which cost so many lives, halted the Confederate invasion of the north, and inspired Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  Thanksgiving Day did not achieve a settled date until the twentieth century.

In the course of the twentieth century, the day’s celebrations came to include college football games and parades with huge floats in several east coast cities.

In recent years, commercial interests have caught up with Thanksgiving.  The day after Thanksgiving, “Black Friday,” is the traditional start of the Christmas Shopping Season.  This is when retailers are desperate to make lots of sales, because so much of their success and survival depends upon sales during the Christmas season.

For me—a Unitarian Pagan—it is difficult to associate with the Pilgrims (although Unitarians do have a connection to those Massachusetts Puritans, and I am thankful for what I have).  My focus is not on shopping.  Even if I may give or receive presents at Christmas time, it is not my priority (although I very much value my time with friends and family at this time of year).

On top of that (and this may seem trivial to some of you), I don’t particularly like turkey!  I don’t care that much for potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauces—all those traditional foods that Americans feel they “must” eat at Thanksgiving.

Indeed, my entire connection to these traditions is a bit conflicted—I’ll be talking about this more by and by.  Even on Veterans Day, and Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July, I feel a little different than most Americans.

I grew up among the military, but not military.  I grew up a civilian among the military (my father worked for the American Red Cross, with the military).  I didn’t live in one settled place until I was twenty-six.  When I entered the College of William and Mary, as a Junior, at age twenty, I had lived on U. S. military bases for a total of ten years—half my life.  An additional two years, I had lived just a few blocks outside an Air Force Base.  Twelve years connected with the military by the time I was twenty!  And of that, five years I lived outside the U.S.

This is just one factor that colors my attitudes towards Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and Thanksgiving.  I can’t give a vanilla American perspective on Thanksgiving.  I do know that many people share my misgivings about “Black Friday” and even football.  But I can only speak for myself, out of my own rather unusual perspective.  More of this, perhaps, to come.

Memorial Day, 2012: Contemplating All the Tributes I See to the Military

As a child, in the 1950s and 1960s, I grew up on U. S. military bases.  By the time I was 21, I had lived on (or next to) military bases for...12 or 13 years.  If I count the baby years that I can’t remember, maybe it was 15 or 16 years!  But I wasn't in the military.  My father wasn't in the military.  He worked for the American Red Cross, serving the military.

So I grew up in the military environment, but not actually military, and not a military family. 

The Red Cross is a humanitarian organization.  The military is not.  The international Red Cross movement offers “neutral humanitarian care to the victims of war.”  The American Red Cross offers “support and comfort for military members and their families.”

I grew up as a Protestant Christian.  In military setting, that meant I attended generic church services designed (so I've heard) not to offend any of the many Protestant denominations.  The other choices for church services would have been Catholic or Jewish.  The same chapel was used for all three.

I read the synoptic gospels and believed in loving my enemies and blessing those who cursed me.  Every day, on base, the American flag was raised and lowered as the National Anthem was played.

I knew an Air Force major who disappeared over North Vietnam in the 1960s.  And a military doctor who made mysterious (to me) visits to Iran in the 1970s.  I knew an alcoholic officer.  I knew Red Cross workers:  One who loved classical music.  Another who was a naturalist and had married a Japanese woman after World War II.  I knew the children of the military, the wives and mothers of the military.   I knew the loneliness and the worry of the military.  On the other hand, thanks to the military, I've lived in Germany and Japan, and traveled to over twenty countries.  My family's housing and medical expenses were subsidized.  Food, clothing, and entertainment were subsidized.

It was a very different life.  Growing up, I lived nowhere more than five years.  It was the same for everyone I knew (except for the few scattered years when I was “off-base.”).  I was very connected to the military, but was not military.  I was disconnected, in any deep sense, from the localities in which I was living.

All of this has left me with, shall I say, some "internal conflicts"...