Yeller Ribbon
You've seen it on the back of every other minivan since 2003. The yellow ribbon magnet. Support Our Troops. Maybe you even felt something the first time you saw one — a flicker of recognition, someone out there sees us.
That feeling didn't last long.
It never does. Because somewhere between the ribbon going on the bumper and the ribbon fading in the sun, nothing actually changed. The VA waitlist didn't get shorter. The neighbor who slapped that magnet on didn't show up when your marriage was falling apart during the second deployment. Nobody at the church potluck asked what it was actually like over there. They thanked you for your service, and that was supposed to be enough — a verbal ribbon, a verbal magnet, and then back to the casserole.
That's what this decal is. It's the ribbon, bent into a question mark. Because we have questions.
There's a moment in Luke 4 that doesn't get talked about enough. Jesus comes home to Nazareth. He reads from Isaiah in the synagogue — good news for the poor, liberty for the captives — and verse 22 says everyone praised him. Spoke well of him. Were amazed at his gracious words. The whole crowd was supportive.
By verse 29, that same crowd was trying to throw him off a cliff.
What happened in between? He reminded them of something they didn't want to hear. He invoked the widow of Zarephath, a foreigner, and Naaman the Syrian general — outsiders who received what Israel's own people didn't. He named the gap between the rhetoric of the hometown crowd and what they actually delivered. And they went from "we support you" to "get out of here" in about seven verses.
The lands Jesus was walking — Zebulun and Naphtali, the old tribal territories of the north — had been destroyed by Assyria centuries before. The commando clans. The fighters. Made a laughingstock, dispersed, disgraced. Isaiah called them "the way of the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles" — which was not a compliment. These were the forgotten ones, the ones whose sacrifice was absorbed into imperial history and then mocked. Matthew 4 identifies these lands as the first place Jesus brings his ministry, quoting that same Isaiah passage. The people who walked in darkness. The ones left holding the bag after the empire was done with them.
Sound familiar?
The yellow ribbon crowd means well, most of them. That's almost the problem. Meaning well is cheap. It doesn't cost you a meal, a night's sleep, or a hard conversation. It doesn't require you to know what MOS means or why a veteran flinches at certain sounds or what it actually costs a family to do three combat rotations. It requires a trip to the gas station and $3.99. And it produces, in the veteran on the receiving end, a very specific kind of loneliness — the loneliness of being seen and not seen at the same time. Acknowledged in the abstract. Invisible in the particular.
Old Yeller got shot by the people who loved him. Not by enemies. Not by strangers. By the family. Because he had become, in their eyes, something dangerous — something that carried a sickness they were afraid of catching. The uniform does that. The deployment does that. You come back changed, and some civilians don't know what to do with that change, so they process their own guilt and grief and discomfort about the wars through you — pin it on you, push it onto you, and then push you away. The thanks is real. So is the distance.
What would actual support look like? The same thing it looks like for any community whose voice has been buried under the weight of someone else's feelings about them: get out of the way and listen. De-center the civilian gaze. Stop processing your relationship to the wars through the bodies of the people who fought them. The grassroots is right here. The people who lived in the compost pile they didn't create are right here, and they have things to say that are more useful than your ribbon.
This decal doesn't ask you to take your ribbon down. It just bends it into the shape it always was.
A question.
Do you actually give a damn — or is this where your support ends?
