Everyone has clothes they own that they are embarrassed to wear- maybe you're too big for it now and it no longer looks flattering or it supported some cause you no longer believe in or maybe it's just not your style anymore. This is not a story of any of those things.
Every day, I look through my clothes trying to decide what to wear. I hate doing laundry so I always wait until I'm down to my last clothes before I drag it all to the laundromat. I'll even wear stuff with stains on it first- of course it helps that I work at home so most days no one but my wife sees me...
But there is one shirt that stays in the back of the bureau drawer, one which I never wear. I don't even unfold it because I can't bear to touch it or look at it.
Last year, I went to an anti-war rally in downtown Los Angeles. When I got there, I saw all of these flag-draped cardboard "coffins" in the middle of the street and found out Veterans for Peace were responsible and were looking for "pallbearers" for them. I volunteered.
Initially, not knowing what I was getting into and for a while, I regretted it because it meant standing for a long time in the hot California sun waiting for the march to begin, but the people I met and the looks on the faces of people as we (finally) paraded down the street made it all worth it.
The payment for helping out VFP at the rally was a T-Shirt which is one of the reasons I initially volunteered. I was far from alone, the shirts were very popular and there weren't very many. In fact, at one point, I saw a VFP member literally give a woman the shirt off of his back because she was disappointed that they had run out before she volunteered. That's how great these guys were.
In the end, I never saw any of the speakers since we were at the back of the line, my arm ached, I was sunburnt, sweaty and uncomfortable and I had to walk several miles back to my car because parking downtown is such a problem but I didn't regret a minute of it.
What I do regret is what was written on that shirt. In large, white letters it says, "1900 DEAD! HOW MANY MORE?" referring to the troops in Iraq. As of this moment, the count is 2569. For the arithmetically impaired, that's 669 more than what is written on my shirt and the number gets higher and higher every single day.
And meanwhile, that shirt sits there in the back of the bureau, making me regularly aware of its presence but I'm too ashamed and embarrassed to read what it has to say. The shirt is a lie now, a lie that gets bigger and bigger every day- and it's Bush's fault.