Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason.
Frederick Douglas (1860)
(Note: Due to the Memorial Day holiday this weekend, we shall leave the subject of sports for a few paragraphs).
I hung an American flag up in my living room last weekend.
It’s a large flag nearly 10 feet long and it takes up most of the wall I put it on.
The flag had been given to my mother during my father’s funeral many years ago. He was an Army veteran.
After I finally got the hardware to mount it sorted out, I stepped back to admire Old Glory.
I suddenly had an understanding of how profound a symbol it remains, despite all it has been through and all those who hate what it represents.
Standing that close to it and having had my hands on the fabric made it all the more real and powerful, all 50 stars burning among the blue field that signifies vigilance, perseverance and justice with the white stripes suggesting purity and innocence and the bright red stripes symbolizing valor.
Such a grand notion and valiant dream for the idea of America.
I thought about all the eras the flag has come through, emerging stronger than ever each time by having overcome one desperate struggle after another.
First came the separation from England and the birth of a new nation, but one with a terrible flaw in its matrix.
Prior to the Civil War, the previously quoted Frederick Douglass pointed out the hypocrisy of Independence Day celebrations in a country where the awful institution of slavery was legal.
According to Douglass, the “celebration is sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless . . . There is not a nation on the Earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than the people of the United States.” (1852).
A few years later, a “bloody” war was fought to abolish that hypocrisy, a war in which more than 350,000 Union soldiers died, along with more than 250,000 of their enemies, enemies who had previously been their countrymen.
Almost 100 years later, more than 400,000 American soldiers would die defending that nation against the forces of tyranny and oppression that emerged in Germany and Japan.
I thought about a 22-year-old Pima Indian named Ira Hayes who was one of the six men to raise the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima and how he suffered from serious PTSD after the war.
I thought about the Tuskegee Airmen and how it took at least 30 years years before their contributions to the war effort were properly recognized.
I thought about the bravery of the 442nd Regimental Combat team, a group of Japanese-Americans who fought with unmatched valor in Europe despite the fact that people of Japanese descent were being herded into incarceration camps on the west coast.
More Americans gave their lives in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan in the years that followed.
While one could argue that some of these later conflicts were unnecessary and spurred by foolish political objectives, the carnage and death that resulted are just as horrible.
That red, white and blue flag flew over all these disparate groups: American Indians, Black soldiers, white soldiers and Asians, with the death of each individual representing a wound that cannot be healed.
So, this weekend, don’t forget about all that. That’s what the holiday is about: those who gave up their lives for this precarious notion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet are still important to me, and I’m growing less and less patient with people who want to throw dirt on the American flag.
So, after you watch “Saving Private Ryan” for the 14th time this weekend and then tune in to the ball game or set up the grill for a barbecue, remember that our human ancestors started cooking meat with fire almost 2 million years ago, so you are carrying on a really old family tradition, one that predates any notion of race of nationality.
And remember to eat some ice cream for desert. You can tell all your friends that Thomas Jefferson, the author of that document that includes the bit about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, wrote down a recipe for ice cream while he was serving as minister to France and brought it back to the United States for us all to enjoy. I’m a big fan of butter pecan.
I’ve read that Jefferson also gets partial credit for the American love for macaroni and cheese, French fries and tomatoes.
Well, now I’m hungry.
Ain’t it good to be alive and to be an American. Selah.