To celebrate the end of the war in Iraq, I propose a new national holiday. A Folly Holiday! One day set aside to mourn and remember, to cheer and forget; to more fully acknowledge our troubling national blind spots.

We’ll stand before the folly of power before falling to our knees and praying for the humility that power never brings.

We’ll wash our feet in the fountain of wealth to remind ourselves to see the necessity of charity and the futility of greed.

I’ll borrow the shoes those other guys wear and stumble along their trail while they try on my sneakers once to hike my humbled mile.

We’ll feast on food that’s “bad for you” and live to tell the tale to remind ourselves how little we know, what our studies never tell.

We’ll snub the neighbors we usually greet and greet the ones we snub to better see the community we’d inadvertently scrubbed.

We’ll unplug all the media and shut down every shop to remind ourselves what might be real before this hamster wheel stops.

We’ll park our cars on the freeways and hike all the way to work and approach every serious assignment with a healthy, skeptical smirk.

We’ll revel in revelation and embrace inconvenient truth to distinguish between our wisdom and the ignorance of youth.

All will pass and none will fail; each will be rewarded with the experience of a small salvation and see the folly of damnation.

And this damned nation might survive another millennium or two if we could, each year, acknowledge half the folly we pursue.

©2011 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved