Retired
When I retired from the Air Force after 24 years of service and returned to my home in Denver, I had trouble finding a church. Initially, my family and I tried to return to the Catholic Church where my daughter was baptized, but it is no longer the church that welcomed us when we were younger.
For whatever reason, like many of our institutions today, it had disposed of the hopeful essence that made it a special place and replaced it with a cold suspicion of anyone the remaining members deemed different.
When I took a step back, I realized that home was not going to live up to the idealized version of home that I had kept in my mind over the course of my service, from my family, to the city, to the state, to the country, to myself. Time and life churned my given family into one that was much different and stranger than the one I left. The North Side neighborhoods where I grew up were largely gone and almost completely replaced with gentrified versions of what I remembered growing up. Winter started much later, and fall is much more truncated.
The most disappointing part of returning home was that, while my family and I were serving, a lot of people in the country went from being hopeful for the future to being afraid of it. With the help of political opportunists that gained more power by making people afraid, too many of the people that survived 9/11, the Great Recession, and COVID, turned into cowards, who only felt more comfortable with their cowardice when they thought their neighbors were more afraid than them. Instead of returning to a civilian populace that looked forward to the future with hope and grace, we returned to a country where using masked Federal agents to terrorize our neighbors is seen by many Americans as part of the cure for their less-than-fruitful lives. The irony of masked Federal agents as the instrument of these cowards is not lost on me. Further, they serve as a symbol for a group of people that know in their hearts that their attempts to make their neighbors afraid is soulless, unjustifiable, and unworthy of our country, and they’d rather hide their face so that they aren’t recognized for being the cowards they are.
Fortunately, returning home also gave me an opportunity to connect with the rest of us who are not afraid. Connecting with fellow Veterans, church goers, Coloradans, my given family, and my chosen family has given us the opportunity to see these cowards, their leaders, and their trifle agents as the small people they are. We remain hopeful and welcome the inevitable evolution of this country into the shining city on the hill that it’s supposed to be. Let the cowards bury their heads and ignore what I learned when I returned home: you can’t stop the clock and there is no going back to the wholly inadequate fantasy of a world that never existed.
My wife often says, “Never argue with a drunk person.” While we should still treat them with love and grace, if these small people want to continue to advocate for a fantasy that makes them feel better about their smallness, then all we can do is move on without them and hope they sober up. There really is no use in arguing with them. Instead, we need to lean in and help our neighbors, our neighborhoods, and our institutions evolve into what they will need to be to provide the next generation a fairer world.
The views expressed by Ben Conde are not necessarily the views of LaVozColorado. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
