One veteran’s view: How patriotic pageantry at sporting events lost its meaning
Will Bardenwerper writing for the Washington Post:
Arguably, the most “heartwarming” of the staged spectacles, the surprise homecomings in which a husband and wife are re-united after a separation, can also be the most misleading. One recent example, replayed millions of times across social media, showed a Marine officer returning from South Korea to the loving embrace of his cheerleader wife during halftime at a professional football game, as the crowd roared in approval. No one should begrudge the couple their well-deserved moment of joy. It was great to see. But these scenes can also present a deceptively saccharine vision of war that invites the crowd to stand and stretch, clap for a few seconds, and return to their drinks and the game with a smile, reassured that everything seems right with the world. By pumping out such romanticized images of homecoming – which are then shared through retweets and posts on Facebook across the country — do we not run the risk of sanitizing the reality of many homecomings that are not the stuff of Hollywood?
When I saw this, I couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like if, instead, the Jumbotron had carried live footage of a military “casualty notification” officer in his dress uniform approaching the door of a comfortable home in middle America, stepping across a carefully manicured lawn, knocking on the door, an American flag blowing lazily in the breeze overhead, and having a mother collapse in tears at the sight of him, before he even has a chance to tell her that her only son had been shot and killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
I’ve grown more and more troubled by such displays. I was mostly aggravated by the fact that a partner or child was lied to just so their family could get a cute story that would go viral, but Bardenwerper’s reasoning cuts deeper.