Independence Day

It is no longer the Fourth of July. It is two days later, and it has taken me those two days to figure out exactly what I want to say. I’m writing to you now from America’s Heartland, God’s Country, Wichita, KS where we have an Air Force Base to the south, a dog track to the north, a mega church to the east, and nothing but wide open prairie to the west. We have had cataclysmic tornados, torrential downpours, and oppressive drought, all in the last 6 months, all unaided by the Kansas National Guard, which is by and large taxed beyond it’s capacity because many of it’s members are currently fighting an unholy war in the Middle East, either in Afghanistan or in Iraq. These are men and women who signed up for a weekend a month and two weeks a year, and maybe some occasional weather duty, who are now trying to dodge car bombs and insurgents in the worst guerrilla warfare this country has seen since Vietnam. And the town of Greensboro, and the town of Coffeyville, and countless other places in this simple state go unhelped and unprotected because of this President’s, and this government’s, misappropriation of human lives.

You have read my words about this administration and it’s basic lack of decency before. If you think I repeat myself, if you think that I am beating a dead horse or sounding like a broken record, it is because they are continuing to do the same. Their dead horse is our national fear, and their broken record is a litany of misdirection aimed at making us pay closer attention to the fact that Paris Hilton had a shortened jail sentence than the fact the Vice President of the United States has declared himself a branch of government all his own. It is a gamut made to insure you don’t pay too close of attention to the fact that the President of the United States literally took the law into his own hands and commuted the sentence of I. “Scooter” Libby in such a way that the judge presiding over the case had to ask the attorneys that argued it to present him with briefs as to how to make the President’s new sentence fit into the confines of the law (he has commuted the sentence to take away the jail time and leave the parole, but the law has no ability to force a parole without the service of jail time). On the eve of the 231st commemoration of the date that a few true patriots wrote a declaration of independence from tyranny and in so doing signed their own death warrant, the current leader of this free nation signed a virtual pardon for a crony, sealing forever his reputation not as a plain-spoken man of the people, but a company shill, a man who could be bought and sold, and who traded in other men’s lives and lies as other’s have traded in his.

It is not just this commutation that has me angry. It is not just the recent blast from the racist, sexist, robber-baron past that our Supreme Court has handed down that has me appalled, and it is not just the general lack of backbone from our congress that has me disheartened. Far more than this, it is the absence of faith that I have in the people of this nation that has me filled with fear. Even when our government was out of step, even when our leaders would not listen, even when our nation was at war, I always, always believed that this was a nation of the people, and the people had ideals. The people knew what this country stood for, could recognize the inherent good and power in the words our forefathers wrote, in the strength of character it took for those men to write those things at a time when writing them was treason. A nation built on ideas, and ideas that men were willing to fight and die for so that others might see them come to fruition. I always, always believed that this was a great nation, because it was filled with a people capable of greatness.

Now, I do not know. I look around and I see people ill informed and unresponsive. I see men and women and children who do not know or care to know the history of our own nation or of our world as a whole. I see people who care more about who wins American Idol then who wins our national elections. I see men and women who disapprove of our president at a whopping 71%, yet their displeasure is witnessed only by the person who takes the poll. Where are the riots? Where are the protests? Where is the accountability? Where are the congressmen and -women that we elected on the promise they would get us out of Iraq? Where is our national pride? When did it become ok with everyone that we are at alternate turns an international laughing stock, or a reckless, dangerous child to be kept at arms’ length? We are the nation that brought an end to the Second World War and fought off Hitler and the Nazis. We are the nation that brokered the New Deal and said no matter what the fortunes of the commercial world, basic human decency dictated that it was not right, and would not be allowed that any man, woman or child in this nation go hungry or homeless, and in doing so redefined what government was capable of. We are the nation that stood up and said we will no longer be silent under the yoke of tyranny, but will fight for what we are worth as human beings, and what we could be as a nation: a beacon of change, of possibility; a new way of being human.

Let us not forget what it meant to say “all men are created equal”. Let us not forget that the Revolutionary war did not start with a gunshot or a cannon ball, but with words, powerful words the like of which had never been spoken before. Let us not forget that amidst all those bumper stickers and paper flags and fireworks and yellow ribbons and red and white and blue there is blood and sweat and tears and a miracle called America. We are a nation created out of fire and passion, a nation created out of the hope that life could be more than toil and struggle and pain, that man was more than a beast of burden for so-called greater men. We are a promise made by our founding fathers, that the next day would be better than the last, that the government was not the ruler of the people, but that the people would be the custodians of the government, and in so doing, would promise to their children a brighter future than the present they had. We would not succumb to tyranny again, from without, or from within, so long as we held fast to the founding article of our national faith: that all men are equal, and therefore no man can be greater than the other.

These are dark days, and I see more dark days ahead. On this anniversary of the cry in the darkness that was to become our great country, I urge, I beg each one of you to consider what it means to be an American. Not just the happy parts, not just the easy parts, but the hard parts, the dangerous parts, the parts that scare us. Please, please, take the time to read the words of the Declaration of Independence, and feel their power within your own heart, within your own soul. Let them call you to arms as they called others 231 years ago. Let them bring you back to what we are meant to be as a nation, so that we can all work towards getting back there together.