It’s 3 A.M. here in Cleveland, Ohio, and I’m waiting for the train to New York. I’ve been here since about 11:30 last night—I walked here from the Greyhound Terminal downtown. I don’t have anywhere else to go: I’m too cheap for a hotel room and too bashful to try and couch surf. Instead, I’m homeless for a night in Cleveland, fulfilling an obscure Kerouac-esque fantasy in the seventh most violent city in the United States.
Here at the train station, Amtrak has an intriguing system-wide policy: uniformed military gets to skip to the head of the ticket line. For some reason, at three in the morning, this is the most bizarrely unfair policy I have yet heard. I respect and support our troops as much as any red-blooded American might. Joining the military is an act to be respected, certainly, but it is far from pure selflessness. There is danger, certainly, and hardship. Still, the military, as we know it in this country today, is an organization one voluntarily commits oneself to—a job, as it were.
A couple hours ago, in Columbus, I bought a bag of Fritos for a man who said he was going to West Virginia. He cornered me outside the bus station. A black man with a crop of graying hair, he smiled and assured me that he wouldn’t shoot. He was a practiced panhandler, opening soft and finishing hard, asking me about what was going on around town—he’d seen crowds, congregating outside hotels and in front of bars. I told him that there was a Lil’ Wayne concert tonight at an arena somewhere. His eyes lit up and he smiled a little bit.
“Where you going? You just wandering around?”
Clearly, I was from out of town. Maybe he was too, but he was the sort of guy who was good at hiding his origins for the benefit of soliciting charity.
“I’m going to get something to eat,” I told him. This was a mistake. It opened the door to all sorts of begging. Without missing a beat, he seized the opportunity and made it clear he was asking for food, not money. He didn’t need any money—just a bag of chips or something small like that, just enough to get hold him over until he got himself to West Virginia.
“Will you be here when I get back?” I asked.
“Well, I mean, I’ll try…” he told me. “I could just get something here, you know?”
He gestured vaguely at the little restaurant inside the Greyhound Station. I didn’t have any cash to give him and I didn’t feel like taking him out for dinner.
Instead, I went to a CVS down the street and bought food. Lots of food, enough for my bus ride and train ride, enough to last me the thousand miles to New York. I bought chips and Oreo cookies and Powerade and pudding and pretzels filled with peanut butter and macaroni I could microwave—if I encountered a microwave between Columbus and New York. I bought a bag of Fritos, for 99 cents.
Back at the station, I handed over the bag of chips and didn’t ask for his name. I didn’t want to know it. I didn’t want to know where he was going exactly or why—I didn’t want to hear his stories or be pressed into giving more. He smiled and thanked me and I told him to have a nice day. And that was it, that was all we wanted from each other—a neat, clean transaction. He wanted a free snack and I wanted to pay the price for being the rich boy in a bus station full of poor people. In Columbus, that price is set just shy of a dollar. Affordable, certainly.
Up the road a bit, in Cleveland, uniformed military skips to the front of the line. I imagine myself in uniform, and try to picture myself skipping the line. Would the lady at the ticket window with the scratchy deep voice facilitate this, or would I have to initiate the process myself? Would other patrons usher me to front?
About a decade ago, after 9/11 and Afghanistan and Iraq, we decided to canonize our military. In so doing, we laid ourselves prone. The more we uphold our military, from the generals down, as infallible paragons moral rectitude, the more we open ourselves up to abuse. Whenever our right to ask questions is made a societal taboo, shit hits the fan.
I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t support our military—we absolutely should. But our support must be respect always and worship never. Soldiers and sailors and airmen—like firefighters and police officers—have achieved something remarkable, an achievement of will and fortitude which provides for our safety and betters our fortunes. But their achievement is foremost a personal accomplishment, to be respected but not made holy. To worship the military is to declare ourselves unworthy of walking amongst them, to transfer, unwittingly, a little bit of their accomplishment over to our shoulders as we struggle to measure up. We steal a difficultly forged identity from hardworking Americans and subsequently allow another sort of people—our military leaders, no less—to be made superior to us—the very definition of an anti-American sentiment. Patriotism is not a yellow ribbon on our bumper or a box of goodies mailed to anonymous soldiers overseas. These acts are acts of compassion inspired by a love and respect for those among us who do the things we ourselves cannot. Patriotism, on the other hand, is something else, something more vexingly complicated, something not so easily scaled to fit a bumper sticker.
I don’t know if my friend from the bus station ever knew military service. Perhaps he did, serving in some forgotten corner of the world, discharged without notice and set out upon the streets in the crudest of fashions. It is more likely, however, he did not serve. Instead, I am quicker to picture him living a useless and destitute life, drifting between bus stations and bars and little apartments he can barely afford, scamming food from guilty white people, scraping together enough money from odd jobs to get himself to his brother’s house in West Virginia where a job is waiting for him—maybe.
Regardless, my bus station friend deserves to be neither a patron of our national compassion nor an example of our modern collective patriotism. He is rather an example of what we have all become. His eyes reflected to me a uniquely American sort of hunger and desperation, a potpourri of fear and wanting and paper-thin confidence. He was, in short, the living embodiment of our new culture—a culture designed to mitigate our guilt. We feel guilty that he might be hungry, that he might be discriminated against, that we might go without doing something we could easily have done. We pity him and buy him corn chips with the same sort of guilty vigor that inspires us slap yellow ribbons on our fenders without stopping to ask why. If I’d done it again, I’d buy him corn chips, certainly. But I’d make him earn it. I’d make him convince me he deserved it, I’d make him tell me his name and his story and what was waiting for him in West Virginia.
Patriotism is like this, asking questions of ourselves to validate our confidence, not our guilt. Had I gotten to known my bus station friend, had I taken the time to hear his story, I would’ve become just a little bit more American. I would’ve known more about who we both were, about where we were going and about why any of it really mattered anyway.
I’d like to think that we all accomplish something in the course of life, even if that one thing which we do accomplish has no ultimate effect on the world. Nobody goes to the Greyhound Station solely for the purpose of going to West Virginia—something is waiting for us at the end of line, otherwise we wouldn’t bother riding. We’re all out to make a change, however slight, on the fabric of the world.
At the moment, I go to college in New York, where I pay a lot of money to sit in a room with an aging absurdist playwright and learn the craft of writing screenplays. On the scale of useless pursuits, my expensive private school education ranks near the top of the spectrum. But I do what I do because I love doing it—and because a part of me believes that somehow, if I write enough and make enough movies, the world will change and be a little bit different when my time comes to leave it all behind. This is my little bit of change, my little struggle to be a patriotic American.
Someday, a sign will inform patrons of the Cleveland Amtrak that screenwriters are welcome to step to the front of the line. An adjacent sign will ask that hustlers with free corn chips be allowed to pass to the head of the same line. Indeed, an infinite multitude of signs will crowd the wall, one on top of the other, each one calling for a different strata of the national collective to step forward and claim their rightful place of respect at the front of the ticket line. It’ll be a mess, for sure, everybody jostling and arguing for their right to be at the front of the line. But it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay because, for the very first time, we’ll each know—and have a little bit of respect for—just what we’re good for: whatever the hell we want.
