The Right Thing

By Roy D. Follendore III

August 16, 2002

The bodies of 911 terrorists are laying in a Government morgue. No one is interested in burying them. This is another disgusting aspect of the hatred we Americans have been consumed in. We are not able to bring ourselves to do the decent thing. As a society we have been responding like animals. Within our hatred we have somehow turned our animal instincts toward the dead bodies of our enemies. Where are our churches that would be preaching to turn the other cheek? Where are the peace protestors that would be marching in our streets saying that man should rise above all forms of war? I do not see them. Do you?

By ignoring the burial of our enemies we have become like the Africans that pulled our dead soldiers through the streets when their Blackhawk helicopter went down. We are a silent mob and the shredded and burned bodies have somehow become our trophies. By not doing the right thing, how can we call ourselves civilized? How can we call our society civilized? It is though there has been an insanity that has swept this great nation. Anger causes our leaders to be frozen and unable to lead a sane path. We have struck out at not only the guilty but the innocent and we say that we have no guilt because it was not intentional. Where is the honor? I see no honor. Where is the pity? I see no pity in us. There is only the frustrated anger pent up in America showing. There are no leaders who are standing up to lead us through our grief. With the drought of summer there has been a far greater drought of forgiveness this year. On this day, like every other day since September 11th, we Americans are kindling our hate to cover up the scars and our sins.

I do not believe that anything changed on 911. I know that we Americans have always had this capability for hatred and bigotry. All we needed were the faces of our enemies to give us the consent to let it out. It disgusts me that my generation is leading the travesty. My Baby Boom generation are the leaders of this country. Are we so poorly leading our country because we are resentful of our lost beliefs, our lost battles and the loss of our youth. Have we loaded our despair with our guilt and our hypocrisy. We continue to jail our children who turned to drugs when it was us who were the original drug generation. We continue to condemn our children for promiscuous sex when we were the generation of free love. Where is our love generation now? Is my generation bound by our own myth or are we simply without conscience because we no longer have the right to be the moral leaders we once were?

One day my generation will have come full circle. We will understand an publicly recognize our virtues as well as our utter failures, and we will have little satisfaction in knowing that we did not do the right thing. Let us bury all of the dead, all of the dead. And with them let us bury our hatred.

.