Here, for the 4th of July, a T-Shirt and a Poem

A writer friend, critical of our nation's true history as well as much that is happening in American society today, was asked this question over and over, “Why don’t you love your country?” The person asking seemed incapable of understanding my friend’s answer, which was “I do love my country!” She loves the land, the people, the lofty ideals. My friend simply wants what so many of us want, which is for our country’s policies, foreign and domestic, to reflect our stated ideals and for all our citizens to respect and protect one another.

Perfection, of course, is a moving target, but certainly we can aim to be better and, aiming sincerely, improve. We can make the future brighter than the past has been.

Pictured above is one of my favorite t-shirts. Like so many in what I would not even presume to call a “wardrobe,” this one came from a thrift shop. I couldn’t resist it, and I love to wear it. “When was America ever kind?” the Artist asked the last time he saw me in the shirt.

I told him it’s like the Langston Hughes poem, “Let America Be America Again,” a poem written 85 years ago during the Great Depression, when Hughes and so many millions in America and around the world were struggling to make ends meet, let alone to realize their dreams. There is sharp poignancy in that word again, since the America that Hughes envisioned, as he makes clear in the poem, “…never has been yet.” 

I have a connection to Langston Hughes, tenuous but important to me. After she graduated from high school, my mother worked for an organization (perhaps the YMCA or YWCA) that sponsored a local reading by the poet, and since she was responsible for putting the event together, my mother was privileged to meet Langston Hughes, who inscribed a copy of his autobiography for her. That treasured book now belongs to me. 

So for July 4, 2020, I want to share my favorite Langston Hughes poem with you who have known it for years as well as you who have perhaps never read it before, because – you know this troubled country of ours? We don’t always act as if we know it, but we truly are all in this together.

Happy 4^th, friends! Let freedom ring!

LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN

by Langston Hughes 
(1902-1967)

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain 
Seeking a home where he himself is free. 

(America never was America to me.) 

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed — 
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme 
That any man be crushed by one above. 

(It never was America to me.) 

O, let my land be a land where Liberty 
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, 
But opportunity is real, and life is free, 
Equality is in the air we breathe. 

(There's never been equality for me, 
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.") 

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars? 

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, 

I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek — 
And finding only the same old stupid plan 
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak. 

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, 
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! 
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed! 

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean — 
Hungry yet today despite the dream. 
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years. 

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream 
In the Old World while still a serf of kings, 
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, 
That even yet its mighty daring sings 

In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned 
That's made America the land it has become. 
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home — 
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, 
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, 
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came 
To build a "homeland of the free." 

The free? 

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today? 
The millions shot down when we strike? 
The millions who have nothing for our pay? 
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay — 
Except the dream that's almost dead today. 

O, let America be America again — 

The land that never has been yet —
And yet must be--the land where every man is free. 
The land that's mine — the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME —
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, 
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, 
Must bring back our mighty dream again. 

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose — 
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, 
We must take back our land again, 
America! 

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me, 
And yet I swear this oath — 
America will be! 

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, 
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, 
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. 
The mountains and the endless plain — 
All, all the stretch of these great green states — And make America again! 

Let’s Think Carefully, Then Talk to Each Other

Out in the countryside

Friends and strangers stopping in the bookstore the last couple of days have been shocked to see me underlining phrases in a book. With a pen, no less! I explain that it’s an old paperback, spine cracked and pages ready to start falling out, and that some previous studious reader already went through the whole thing with yellow highlighter. One young man asked, “Are you doing a word search? My mother does that.” Seems the whole concept of underlining key ideas in a text had passed him by. But I am of another generation, of course....

The book I’ve been reading is a little anthology of historical writings on the American Revolution with an arresting title: The Ambiguity of the American Revolution. The book’s editor, Jack P. Greene, in his excellent introduction, traces the history of our history, as it were – the different interpretations given over time to the Revolution, starting with contemporary accounts -- because even in the 1770s, there was no unanimity of view. Loyalists saw the conflict one way, patriots another, and their perspectives colored the way they wrote their accounts. John Adams himself said there were as many American Revolutions as there were colonies and perhaps as many as individuals in those colonies. Everyone had a slightly different take on it at the time, and through successive periods of our country’s life new interpretations have emerged in waves, to be supplanted in their turn by others. This diversity of perspective is something we often lose sight of, now that we’ve had two hundred and forty-one years to come -- more or less, in textbooks if nowhere else -- to agreement on a national narrative.

[See continuation of discussion of this book here.]

David Ramsay, a Maryland physician who graduated from the College of New Jersey in the year of the Stamp Act crisis (1765), eventually wrote of the Patriot cause and the newly formed United States of America:

The world has not hitherto exhibited so fair an opportunity for promoting social happiness. It is hoped for the honour of human nature, that the result will prove the fallacy of those theories, which suppose that mankind are incapable of self-government. 

– from his History of the American Revolution, first published in Philadelphia in1789, an excerpt of which appears in The Ambiguity of the American Revolution

President Abraham Lincoln, during the Civil War, addressing the crowd at Gettysburg, noted that the crowd that day “met on a great battlefield of that war,” a war “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” Far short of three hundred years old, our country remains an experiment, its success into the future far from guaranteed.

Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press: If the “national security” entails restricting those freedoms, what “security” do Americans have? I picked up another book at home this morning, Moyers on America: A Journalist and His Time, and, opening at random, fell by chance – true story – on a chapter entitled “Journalism and Democracy.” On the first page of that chapter, Bill Moyers (one of my heroes) says that after less than two years as White House press secretary,

It took me a while to get my footing back in journalism. I had to learn all over again that what’s important for the journalist is not how close you are to power but how close you are to reality. ... 

 I also had to relearn one of journalism’s basic lessons. The job of trying to tell the truth about people whose job it is to hide the truth is almost as complicated and difficult as trying to hide it in the first place.

The lighter side

Today is the 4^th of July, and Americans are gathering again, all over the country, in crowds large and small. We take time out from our ordinary pursuits to re-read the Declaration of Independence. (In Leelanau County, such readings usually take place in front of a village post office. See below for Northport event.) The mood of Independence Day is celebratory. There are parades and marching bands and flags waving in the breeze and displays of fireworks against the summer night sky.

Patriotic village gathering

While most of us do not see ourselves “met on a battlefield” this July 4, 2017, we are painfully aware that our country is deeply divided. We are divided not only on issues, but on our most basic core value, freedom. What does ‘freedom’ mean, and how is it best protected? Beneath all the posturing and tweets and insults, that is the crucial question.

Coming fast upon the heels of the first question, however, is another: How can the question about freedom be answered in a civilized manner?

If we cannot agree on an answer to the second question, the first becomes moot, because when civil discourse gives way to hate, attacks on freedoms proliferate, and repression ensues, and when hate gives way to violence, life and liberty both fall victim.

Can the current trend of incivility and increasing repression be reversed? Can our freedoms endure? It’s worth taking a few minutes to ponder these questions on this day of air shows and hot dogs and sparklers.

Eternal vigilance!