Today is POW/MIA Recognition Day. We hang the flag, we salute, we nod.
Steinbeck’s words, “You can only understand people if you feel them in yourself," remind us that it can’t stop at a ceremony. To honor someone missing, you need to imagine it was your father, your brother, the neighborhood kid who never came home. That is the only way it cuts deep enough to matter.
We should carry that same weight when we look at each other on the street. Since the covid flu, the world has been running on a short fuse and the smartphone era has intensified it. Everybody is shouting into the glow of their screen, pumping out their hot takes like smoke from a glue factory. You can’t miss the loudmouth liberals and the caustic conservatives; they are too busy telling us how bad it all is.
They aren’t the ones I worry about.
It is the quiet ones that need our attention.
The guy staring down at the sidewalk, so he doesn’t have to meet a pair of eyes. The woman sitting in her car in the parking lot a little longer before heading inside. The distraught who deleted the text instead of hitting send. That’s where the hurt lives now, behind lowered heads and swallowed words.
Doing a kind act doesn’t magically make you a kind person. Steinbeck’s line says the real work is in feeling someone’s burden in your own chest. That is harder than dropping a few dollars in a GoFundMe or clicking a like. It is taking a beat, looking at the stranger in front of you, and asking, what if that was me?
The flag for the missing flies high today. Let it remind us that every day, in every ordinary place, people are missing as well. Not from a war overseas, but from the simple recognition that they really do matter. Our job is to see them, to understand them and not let anyone slip through the cracks in this short time we have together.
Happy Friday Chalkheads, make sure Eleanor Rigby isn't missing in action this weekend...
