How to Sunbathe Near a War Zone

Today the news is strange and the news is juxtaposed strangely.

Advertisements have never felt less appropriate.

On Twitter, a scholar warns of constitutional crisis. The next tweet down concerns a zombie film.

On CNN, the chyron reads “How the press operates in authoritarian times.” Then there’s a commercial for dog food.

Meanwhile, at JFK, a place most often associated with frequent flyer miles and duty-free perfumes, we shout anti-fascist things and we lift up the signs.

We are better than this, read one. Everyone is welcome here, read another. Cars, leaving the terminal, honked their support. The parking lot decks, packed with onlookers, swelled.

Build the wall, the crowd yelled, we’ll tear it down.

And meanwhile some other body, somewhere else, in some whiter skin, went on a date.

We are all strangers in this strangely juxtaposed land.

Afterwards, I went to a dinner party in Manhattan. The men were laughing. The women were talking about Tinder dates, and Antigua, and how delicious the sushi was. Everyone was comparing weekend plans.

“Oh you went to JFK,” someone said, between polite bites of sashimi. “Thank you for doing that.”

Thank me?

For doing that?

We are all strangers in this strangely juxtaposed land.

Twenty years ago, my cousin Dan was a fighter pilot. He flew F-15s. He was in the kitchen once, telling me a story. This was after the Kosovo War.

“We launched from Italy. Flew over the coasts. Ran our mission. Dropped our payload,” he said, popping the top off a beer.

“And then I’m flying back, and I fly back over the coast. Over the beaches. And I could look out the cockpit and see the people down there. I could see them laying out on the beaches. It was so strange.”

He took a pull from his bottle.

“They were all sunbathing … and there’s a war zone only a few miles away.”