I‘ve commented before on the events commemorated today and upon the problems attendant upon that commemoration. I do note hearing less about the matter this time around than previously, which I am not sure is a good thing–or even consistent with other issues. There are a lot of failures, setback, and evils that get repeated and propped up, and I am in favor of pointing out the problems in things. (Yes, I am great fun at parties; why do you ask?) At the same time, I am not in favor of praising those who are not praiseworthy, and I am not unmindful that the political circumstances that lead to certain acts of praise beginning are no longer in force. (Others very much are, to the collective detriment of the world and my small part of it.) So there is and remains some tension in my mind and thought, and I remain uncertain how to resolve it.

So much said, I recognize the position I occupy in that regard as one privileged. I am not burdened by the outcomes of the events in question, except that I choose to be; I could follow the example set by a great many, no few of which remain on live, and simply not give a damn about such things as the perniciously persistent inequities and erasures that are at work in the world. I could simply let things be, not digging deeper into “old shit” that “doesn’t matter,” even if it is the case that my tax dollars are paying for the maintenance of commemorations to what amounts to the beginnings of genocide. (Taking time off costs money, too, you know.) I could shut my eyes to the plight of others plain to see, seal my ears against the mourning plain to hear–and there are even justifications I might give for doing so. There are enough other problems in the world, after all, and I can actually do something about some of them, now and again; I would not be wrong to focus my attention on those problems and work to address them, rather than to give even so much attention as this to something that lies almost wholly outside my abilities.

But that “almost wholly” nags at me, one of many such things to do so.

I readily admit that there is not much I can do in this world. I am trained in the humanities in a world that does not value them and barely pretends to do so, and I labor to the extent that I am able (I am looking for work, by the way, but people have to be willing to hire for me to find it) under a load of debt that I took while believing–because I had been told as much, repeatedly across many years, by people I was supposed to be able to trust to know what they were about–that my doing so would lead to the kind of job that would allow me to repay that debt and the concomitant interest and to have a comfortable life in which I could understand myself to be doing some good for some people. Each inhibits what I can actually do. But if all I can do is to keep in mind the wrongs done in the world of which I am aware, then I am obliged to do it by my ethics and morals. (Yes, I do have them.) Thus something like this, in which I note what I see is and how I see it, though I do not know how I can make things better.

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