Land of the Free
The 4th of July, 2020 may be the most difficult yet. I feel with all my heart, and both experience and research agree, that we are navigating a turning point in our nation’s destiny. Some might say my sense of the desperation of things is an understandable and forgivable projection of my inner world given all I’ve been through the last two years. And that would be a caution worth listening to. Losing Gina to cancer was catastrophic and the year leading up to her death tore my soul out. Part of me died along with the promise of our life together. Read on with that caution in mind because my offerings here are born of pain. But, there is one more thing. As bad as the pain has been, hope and beauty from a good creation has, and always will, infuse life into any area of soul receptive to the good. Love unexpected enters and the healing of loss moves a pace faster.
As I reflect on the celebration of the birth of our nation, trauma and hope compete for priority.
I begin with trauma.
We are a nation in pain, whatever your politics. We are living through the trauma of losing people and securities and future hopes and livelihoods. For some the ideal image held close to the heart is threatened, and for some the ideal-never-realized remains a distant, fading hope. Wanting justice, we stared at instance after instance after instance of police, those we want to believe are the good guys, brutalize old men, young women, a young man walking his bike away from a protest repeatedly beaten by several cops, a woman spinning away from sexual assault - her actions deemed by police as resisting arrest - stood in panic as two cops beat her thighs till she finally fell. Image after image of cops with no sense of restraint, no seeming accountability and no remorse for inflicting trauma on those powerless to stop them and setting in the minds of millions a deep sense of loathing and suspicion for a police culture we want to be good for our communities. We felt what the black and minority communities have long endured whose men and women and children have been murdered by those who should protect their freedoms.
Hundreds of millions witnessed a president of the United States order a church plaza violently cleared of peaceful protesters exercising their First Amendment rights so a picture of him could be taken holding up a bible in front of an iconic church.
Thousands of children have been held at detention centers on our border by our government in conditions inhumane to adults and inexcusable and cruel when done to children. According to Jeff Sessions, the reason for the “Zero tolerance policy was to dissuade immigrants from coming to the US. Cruelty against children became policy of the US government.
With those who hate our government institutions are now in charge of them, the list of for-profit abuses of our public trust seems endless.
How do I celebrate my country this July 4th? Sometimes I feel our flag should be flying upside down as a signal of a nation in dire circumstance. We are a nation divided and in distress. The lamp of the Evangelical church in America is out; their angel has flown. It has sold its credibility for a brief moment of power, and by and large remains wedded to this moral failing of historic proportions.
There is yet hope at this hinge point in our national destiny. Pepper spray to the face is a rude force, and in the abstract, we have been collectively maced, shot with non-lethal instruments of crowd control. There has been and is a crowd of us advocating for change. Globally, hundreds of thousands have marched against racism and its influence on police brutality. At long last, those with hands of the levers of power have initiated reforms to their policing policies and agreements with the police union, some in fear for their office, and some from compassion and outrage. At every hinge point in history the old way of understanding ourselves clashes with new and necessary ways of redefining ourselves and our actions in a changed ecology of being. Life seems chaotic, unpredictable, and threatening in the midst of change, but it is really us creating the chaos by the actions coming from sorting out the new from the old in our shared community. It isn’t a benign process. We’ve seen people die.
As a collective, we have yet to decide which side of our destiny will ultimately prevail. Our history of self denial is deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. And the myth of what we want to be as a nation, we have yet to achieve. That vision of America as a just, vibrant land for all people regardless of skin color, religion, cultural origin is on our horizon and we have a pathway to that future history. It will take courage and commitment to our common well-being to get there.
This current state of things has a long history. Our nation was not immune from the presumptions of European imperialism and Old World based social Darwinism. Genocide happened here. Sterilizations of those deemed less happened here. The raiding and razing of villages of those weaker happened here. The marginalized were dehumanized and murdered here. Redlining and other forms of institutionalized prejudice that held down generations of those with different skin color and a different culture or religion happened here. Now those Old World habits, habits the Old World has largely thrown off, have at last become intolerable to enough Americans to fill the streets of city and village alike with those demanding change.
And here is reason to celebrate our America. Not for what we were, but for what we can become because of the vision of freedom, equity, and justice for all. This is reason for sober, reflective celebration, not with skyrockets, but with wafer and wine - symbols of sacrifice and of redemption, and that we are not alone in this vital work of ours.