For the Sake of All Our Sons

I woke somewhere over the Aleutians, in the dark of a wide-body 787 cabin that had been dimmed hours before, in the small blue island of my own reading light, with the sound of the engines steady and the sound of a phone against the tray table more insistent than it should have been. I looked at the reflection of my own face in the oval of the window, and past my reflection at the darkness that had no country in it, and I picked up the phone. There was a small stack of notifications from the hours I had been asleep, and I opened the first one, and the first one was a post on X saying that Lindsey Graham was dead.

I want to tell you what happened after that, because it is the thing I have to say and cannot say lightly.

I was happy.

I mean, I felt happiness. Before I had thought about it, before I had asked the questions a man asks himself about a report on X in the middle of the night, before I had reminded myself that I had been raised by a woman who would have opened the Book at that hour to a specific verse about the mercy owed to the dead, before any of that, I felt what a person feels when a weight has come off. Not the weight of the news itself. The weight of the man in the news. He had been, for some time, one of the specific weights I did not know I was carrying, and I discovered that I had been carrying it only in the moment it was gone.

I would like to tell you that shame put a hand on the feeling and moved it out of the room. It did not. I sat with the shame and I sat with the feeling and the two of them sat with me in seat 9L of the American Airlines nonstop, and the song in my headphones, Firm Friends by Drake, kept looping into the space where a psalm would have been, and by the time we had crossed the coast the aircraft was steady on the descent line and the feeling was still there, honest and quiet and mine.

That is the sentence I will not run from. I hated how genuinely happy I was, and I could not make myself stop.

There is an old ask that a country makes of its citizens on days when men like this die. The ask is that the citizens respect the dead. I was raised to accept that ask without argument, and I have accepted it, for most of my adult life, without stopping to interrogate it. Somewhere over the Pacific, at some altitude I could not name from inside a dimmed cabin, I found myself unwilling to accept it in this case. The reason came into focus with the same quiet clarity as the happiness had. One is only expected to respect the dead if the dead respected the living. Lindsey Graham did not. That is not a claim about death, which is common to us and merits its own kind of hush. It is a claim about the arithmetic of respect, which is not common at all, and which has to be earned in the specific ledger of what a man did with the years he was given. The country wants to collect a respect from me it has not paid on his behalf. I am not going to pay it.

I want to be careful about what did this to me, because I do not want to blame one senator for the work of a country. The country did the work. The senator was a small clarifying event inside a longer accumulation. Maybe it started earlier than any of the recent politics. Maybe it was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in the parking lot of the VA hospital in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, at eight or nine years old, watching the door and waiting for my father to come out of an appointment I did not understand and would not learn to name until years later. Maybe it was the phone calls in the fall of 1990, when he told me from the other end of a receiver that he might have to go fight the Gulf War, and that it would be, in his own word, good. Maybe it was the afternoon in 1997 when he took his own life after a career in this country's Army had, by his own accounting, closed him off from any understanding of what actually mattered, and the man whose mind had been shaped by war decided he had no further use for what was not war. It was also thirty years of watching the men who wrote the wars send other men's sons to fight them, and specifically Black men's sons, and specifically the sons whose fathers had spent their working lives explaining to those sons why they should love a country that would eat them. It was watching one careful representative after another get pushed out of the room for saying what any honest reader of the Constitution would say aloud. It was watching a set of files that were said to contain the names of the powerful get slow-walked and reclassified until they were, in the practical sense, gone. It was watching another country's prime minister be handed the microphone in a joint session of Congress in June and use it to sell my sons a war that was not theirs. It was watching the rails of the century's new financial architecture get laid down in places I could not name at a table my country was not invited to sit at, and hearing my own government explain to me, patiently, that this was somehow good. It was, in the end, all of it. It was thirty years of the country doing its work on the boy I had been, and the boy I had been was not, on Sunday morning at forty thousand feet, in seat 9L. Some other man was.

That was the man Lindsey Graham had helped make.

Now let me say the thing about him plainly, because plainness is what I owe the moment.

He voted for Iraq and he never took it back. He wanted Libya, and he wanted Syria, and by 2010 he was already writing the case for a war with Iran, which finally came in the February of this year, and which he was on television inside the hour selling. About that war he had said, in a phrase he did not have the wit to be embarrassed by, that America was going to make a tonne of money off of it. About the campaign in Gaza he had said that we should level the place. He was in Kyiv on the Friday before he died, standing beside another president, selling another war to another camera, on his tenth pilgrimage to a country whose ordinary people he could not have named. He was, on the record, in a 1998 interview he never retracted, not a combat soldier. He said, honestly, I am not a war hero, and never said I was. I am willing to grant him the honesty of that one sentence. What I am not willing to grant him is what he did with the shelter it gave him. He built a career inside a lawyer's office and used it to buy passage for other men's sons into the countries he himself never had to enter. He took, over his time in the Senate, more than a million dollars from the political action committees organized around another country's foreign policy. The Republican Jewish Coalition was, by the accounting of OpenSecrets, his single largest sponsor. Those donations bought votes. Those votes bought wars. Those wars bought coffins. Those coffins came home to families whose names have never appeared on any donor list and whose grief has never crossed the threshold of any conference call.

The song looped. The aircraft dropped through some transition altitude and I felt the small pressure in my ears that means the ground is coming.

I have two Black sons. I do not think about their futures as separate from the futures of the men who decide which wars they will be asked to fight. I cannot. No father of Black boys in this country can, and any father of Black boys who tells you otherwise is either lying to you or lying to himself. The men who sit in the chairs Lindsey Graham sat in do not think about my sons at all. Or, when they do, they think about them the way a spreadsheet thinks about a line item, the way a warehouse thinks about inventory, the way an actuary thinks about the acceptable rate at which the merchandise breaks. That is not an accusation. That is a description. Any father of Black boys who has read the actual language of an actual defense authorization has read that description, and understood it, and put the paper down. Lindsey Graham was one of the men who wrote that language. He is not, this Sunday morning, one of the men writing it any longer, because he is not. I am glad of that. I am glad of it in the specific way a father is glad of anything that puts him and his sons one small step further from the machine that has been trying to eat them for two hundred and fifty years. I will not dress the gladness up in anything else. It does not need dressing.

I know what the country will say this week. There will be the obituaries and the tributes and the anchors that reach for the word titan, and the presidents who release statements as though they had loved him, and the colleagues who go to the microphone and remember him with the particular tenderness the powerful reserve for their own dead. Underneath all of it will be the ask I have already refused. He did not respect the living. He does not qualify for the hush the country wants me to keep. Let them speak. I have nothing to add to any of it. The boy I was, the boy raised by a woman who taught me that the mercy owed to the dead is not optional, would have found a way to say a psalm for him by breakfast. That boy is at home. He is not on this plane. He is somewhere in a kitchen I know very well, with a woman in white scrubs who has come in from a shift at the hospital and put her keys on the counter and asked me about my day. The man in this seat is what a country made in the years between that kitchen and this cabin. This is who is writing. I am not going to pretend the boy is at the keyboard, because he is not, and the reason he is not is a public record with your name on it, Senator.

The dead are owed our respect only if they respected the living. He did not. So. Goodbye, and good riddance.

You are off the board this morning. The wars you were selling on Friday will be sold by other men on Tuesday, and I know that, and I am not making the claim that the country is now safe. I am making the smaller and more honest claim that it is, on this one Sunday morning, a little less unsafe. One specific hand has left one specific dial. The dial will be turned by other hands. I know that too. But on the mornings we are given, we take what we are given, and this morning I am given the specific fact that one of the men who spent thirty years wagering my sons against the ambitions of the people who paid him is no longer able to move the wager. I take that. I take it plainly. I take it without apology and without disguise and without the polite fictions the country asks of me on days like this, because if I cannot say this plainly to my sons when they are old enough to read it, then everything I have been writing all summer has been a lie.

I have been thinking about the life my father might have had if the country he served had asked something of him other than the willingness to kill or die on its behalf. He had a mind with more room in it than the desert had room for. He had hands that could have built, or healed, or kept the books of a business he might have owned, or held a house through the long years a house needs holding, or held a boy in the small evenings that were not war and were not preparation for war. The country asked him for the smallest and most reducing use of himself, and it kept asking until he did not know what a man was for outside the shape of what it had asked. I do not know if he would still be alive if it had asked something else of him. I know that the distance between the man he was and the man the country made out of him killed him.

I have two Black sons. The work I owe them, the work I have been trying to name for years and now can, is to know my own purpose clearly enough that neither the country nor its wars nor the men who write them can talk me out of it, and to leave my sons a purpose of their own so specific that the same men cannot write theirs for them either. A father who does not know his purpose leaves his sons open to whoever will tell them what theirs is supposed to be. I do not want that for my sons. My purpose is not to fight the country's wars. It is not to explain them. It is to stand between the machinery and my children and to build inside my house a way of being that does not need the country's permission to be worth something. That is what I have to give them. That is what I want them to give theirs.

The flight attendant has just asked me to stow my tray table and put my electronic devices away. Which means that this letter has to come to an end. I am glad to end it here.

For the sake of all our sons.