Reflections

The grave marker belongs to a man and a life unknown to me. A mystery further shrouded by weeds and dead leaves. Hidden but not forgotten, the flag placed there adds meaning for the flag means something important to me.

Does the flag mean the same thing to me as it did to the life of the person commemorated by the fading marker? An impossible question to answer.

Should a flag fly over my grave would people see it and superpose their understanding of the flag over my own? Or will they superimpose, adding to the meaning, instead of replacing the true meaning?

What did I just do upon viewing the marker and flag that stood before me?

Happy Independence Day America.

The slider never reaches ten but I’ve heard it go to eleven.

The assembly, not the amperage, makes the sound eleven.

Henry David Thoreau was a reporter to a journal of no wide circulation (according to his words). His accounts were never recognized and he described himself as a “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms”. He admits to accurately reporting for a number of years until the lack of recognition brings him to tell this story as a description of his situation and chosen course of action.

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house
of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any
baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!”
exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve
us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off–that
the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and
standing followed–he had said to himself: I will go into business; I
will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he
had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be
the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary
for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make
him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be
worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate
texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet
not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them,
and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my
baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.
The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why
should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?

-Henry David Thoreau. Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Our society is centered around buying and selling. We devout such attention to selling our selves, our skills, our personality, so that other people will buy our wares, our time, our friendships. As a consumer society have we neglected the other side, how to “avoid the necessity of selling”?