Do you think of Pomp and
Circumstance, of the dozen
or so steps first generation
college students take to ascend
the stage and receive a roll of paper
standing for their diploma, as all
their relatives on the sidelines cheer? Who
thinks of Wagner’s Lohengrin, the trumpet
chorus before the newlyweds enter the bridal
chamber? In the 1915 Armenian genocide,
thousands of women and children were forced
to march across the Syrian desert, and in 1945
more than a hundred thousand prisoners
led to Stutthof and Auschwitz. Just three
years before, my father as a young man joined
thousands in the Bataan Death March; I don’t know
how or where on the road to San Fernando he lost
the nail on his pinky finger, but he bore
that scar until the end of his days. And I was still
in diapers when more than two hundred thousand
joined Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial
where he spoke of our dream. When I think of an exodus
of people fleeing bombs and wars and burning villages,
I don’t want to think of the helicopter scene in Miss
Saigon, or of phalanxes of solders goose-stepping
in front of a little man who wants a dress parade
complete with stiff salutes to make him feel he is
adored instead of reviled. After the three
wise men paid Herod a visit, he carried out the Massacre
of the Innocents. Then as now, we grieve for the weakest
and smallest sacrificed: the ones who walk until they
can walk no more, who die of trauma and starvation.