Today is National Donut Day here in the US.
I wonder whether it was someone’s idea of a marketing gimmick or sick joke—which are more or less the same thing—to merge a day devoted to sugar consumption with one the anniversary of a pivotal campaign in a war that consumed so many lives.
I’ll admit that I am not so ideologically or dietetically pure that I didn’t partake of a promotion: I bought a cup of coffee—enough to entitle me to a freebie—and picked one of the most decadent-looking sugarbombs in the display case at the Fordham Plaza Dunkin’ Donuts: a chocolate cake ring with chocolate icing and pink stripes.
Now, did those (mostly) young American, Australian, British, Canadian, Czech, Dutch, French, Greek, Norwegian, Polish, South African, Southern Rhodesian and New Zealand fighters risk—and in some cases lose—their lives so we can enjoy sweet baked goods? Of course not. But I did think about them because I think about them, and other like them, whenever war is commemorated.
And I think about them precisely because I am (mostly) a pacifist. I believe, as Kurt Vonnegut (himself a WW II veteran) said, that Hitler was “pure evil” and had to be stopped. But the conditions that fueled his rise to power—the devestation wrought by “the war to end wars” could have been avoided had the “haves” not wanted more from the “have nots.”
Am I the only one who thinks about stuff like this while riding? Or was it the sugar rush I got from that free donut which may have been responsible for the sprint I pedaled along the Bronx River Greenway.
