Long Way Home, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

May 5, 2012 Martha Thomases 6 Comments

It’s not easy, but I’m getting angry at my television again.  Not as an appliance, but as a delivery system for the news.

This is remarkably less fun when the only other being to hear my outbursts is the cat.  Instead of shouting back, either in agreement or as the beginning of an interesting debate/argument, she runs away.  She is disturbingly apolitical.

Lucky for me, I didn’t find out about the big local story until after it happened.

The GOP has been angry that Obama is taking credit for being President when bin Laden was killed.  They don’t like that he made an ad celebrating that fact, an ad that pointed out that he made actual executive decisions in order to accomplish the mission.

Maybe they have a point.  Maybe it is tasteless to capitalize on an era in our history that cost the United States thousands of lives, and tens of thousands of casualties.  However, as Jon Stewart reminds us here, we had seven years of this same GOP using the same tragedy to elect their candidates.

And this week, we had Romney and Rudy “9-11” Giuliani exploiting the same event yet again, but saying they are providing a contrast to Obama’s alleged “victory lap.”

Obama, being President, had actual business to do in Afghanistan, but I’m sure he was also aware that giving a speech in front of our troops is a great visual.  Giuliani must have convinced Mittens that New York firefighters could do the same for him.

Had I known about this beforehand, I might have found it necessary to cancel my appointment uptown and walk the three blocks to protest.

This is the firehouse closest to where I live.  The firefighters who serve there are part of my community.  They work really hard to keep us safe.  With a tragic frequency, they die to keep us safe.  On September 11, 2001, 11 of them died at Ground Zero.  A few weeks before that, six had died at another fire.

It makes me angry that Mitt Romney thought he could buy these men a few pizzas and co-opt their service.

When my son was a toddler, we lived a few blocks farther away, but it was still the one that served our neighborhood.  Being a toddler, he loved big, noisy trucks, so we often walked by the firehouse, conversing with the guys on duty.  My son especially liked looking at their empty boots, lined up along the wall, waiting for an alarm.

Quite often, he would be cranky at the end of the day, and we would take a walk after dinner.  First, we would go to the car wash, which he thought was the funniest thing he had ever seen.  Then, we would go to the fire house.  It took a long time to go to these important landmarks, but they reassured him that he was home.  We could go back to our apartment and put him to bed.

The service that my husband liked best in the hospital was the music therapist.  Sometimes she would encourage him to play music with her, with a tambourine or maracas.  Sometimes she just sang.  The last time, she sang “Long Way Home” by Tom Waits, although I suspect she was inspired by the Norah Jones version because that was the hit.  I had never listened closely to the song before.  This time I did, and had to leave the room so John wouldn’t see my tears.

I would very much like to take another long walks home.  I’m sure the families of those lost firefighters would like that, too, and the families of the soldiers and civilians lost to war.  If we could have a walk like that, we wouldn’t stop for pizza.

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Media Goddess Martha Thomases has been a Tom Waits fan since he was a guest on Fernwood 2Night.