Lilacs in a garbage dump ...

A comment I heard from a post featuring Stephen Fry hung around my neck all day yesterday. He commented that, despite the rightful abhorrence of slavery, and certainly not for a millisecond condoning any aspect of it, there arose from it the [African-American] spirituals that have warmed our hearts and lifted our spirits for centuries.

It made me think of other atrocities and the tiniest rays of light that grew, despite massive efforts at repression, from those atrocities.

From the Jewish Holocaust, came some of the most heroic art as well as some of the most inspiring words ever penned by humans such as Elie Wiesel and Viktor Frankl.

From the Great Depression and Dustbowl tragedies in America, we received the words of John Steinbeck and the music of Woody Guthrie.

From the insanity of 9-11, we have the legends of heroic public employees who gave their lives to try and save other Americans whom they didn’t even know.

From the multiple-mendacities and criminal acts of the Vietnam War debacle, we treasure the words of Tim O’Brien and the heroism of a POW named John McCain. (Yes, John McCain, the memory of whose heroic sacrifice towers above the antics of his most recent critic like Mount Everest over a dung hill.

From World War One, we have some great poetic lines, such as those of Rupert Brooke,

“If I should die, think only this of me:

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.”

And, of course, World War Two, for Americans, produced the greatest coming-home party ever witnessed, led by such songs as It’s been a long, long time, featuring what it probably the best guitar work (Les Paul) ever recorded on a popular song in America. (IMHO)

And, the monster Joseph McCarthy did, after all, produce the American hero Joseph Welch who laid him low and maybe saved America as we know it.

For me, it caused me to think about once when I toured a municipal garbage dump with a mayor. As we walked around the stench and filth of the facility, we came upon a small patch of blooming lilacs, proudly waving over the discarded trash of the city.

 Do we condone atrocities because some snippets of beauty may have grown from them? Certainly not. Our world would have a much better place had they never occurred. It may only signal to us that, in our darkest moments, some gleams of sanity and beauty may lie “a’borning.”

And, boy, do we Americans need those tiny bits of sanity and beauty now.

Yeah, it took a female and a 

sailor to provide an icon 

to victory in war.