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Category: patriotism

Circles

Circles

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In the end it all comes down to circles. I walk to the table, pull out my own pen (superstition? fastidiousness?) and ink in the ovals on the paper ballot.

I move my pen slowly, methodically. In my mind are memories of 2000, hanging chads, holding ballots up to the light. Let there be no questions, no doubts. Just miles from where I live, federal buildings are barricaded, extra police are patrolling.

When I finish, I slide my ballot into the machine. A message reads “Your vote is counted.” In exchange I receive another circle, a sticker to wear. “I voted.”

After all the anxieties and doubts and change of candidates in July. … After scanning the newspaper for months, shielding myself from news I know will make me crazy. … After all the emails and texts asking for money and support. … After all of this, it comes down to this ballot, these circles, this vote. It’s my right as a citizen, and I embrace it fervently. I hope we all do!

Sousa!

Sousa!

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There was a time when I played John Phillip Sousa music as we took down the Christmas tree. It was cheerful and made that seasonal task less melancholy than it would have been. 

But I hadn’t listened to Sousa marches in a while, winter or summer, until day before yesterday. Looking for suitable accompaniment to my Independence Day walk, I streamed a recording of Stars and Stripes Forever, the Washington Post March, Liberty Bell, Thunderer and many others. 

They certainly put a skip in my step, which would otherwise have been lagging due to heat and humidity.

It was a 45-minute trip to the turn of the century, not the last turn, the one before that. I imagined unicycles and bunting and girls with pigtails, all made possible by America’s March King. 

Today I repeated the experience. It felt just as fine. 

(Military observance at Sousa’s grave. Courtesy Wikipedia)

New Citizen Abo

New Citizen Abo

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Almost five years ago, his father stood with others from around the world and promised to defend this country against all enemies, foreign and domestic. My son-in-law Appolinaire recited the oath, shook hands with a customs officer and received a certificate of naturalization. 

Today, Appolinaire and my daughter will watch as their son becomes an American citizen. Prince arrived in the U.S. from Benin, West Africa, at age 11, on the first birthday of his baby sister.  She will be in the audience today, as will all of us, watching with pride as Prince, now 13, receives a gift he may not understand as well as his father did but which he will come to appreciate in time. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It’s still a remarkable statement, still a wondrous philosophy on which to build a nation. And when you see the fervor with which new citizens embrace it, our country and its founding ideals feel as fresh and extraordinary as they did almost 250 years ago. 


(A snapshot from a 2019 naturalization ceremony)
The Lady Vanishes?

The Lady Vanishes?

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When I was in New York last month I snapped a photo of Lady Liberty from the High Line. The sky was hazy (though not smoke-filled), and you could barely make out the statue’s distinctive profile. (Zoom in and look to the right of the gray girder to see the vague form hoisting her torch.)

As I thought about what to say this morning, I remembered snapping this shot, thought it might have a certain metaphorical significance: the lady vanishes, the statue so far away that it’s almost not there at all. 

Don’t we feel that way sometimes about our country, about its ideas and ideals, that we’ve forgotten what unites us in our fights over what divides us? 

The trick, I think, is to do what we can as citizens to keep alive its founding principles: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Tolerance, too. 

Ten Years Later

Ten Years Later

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Ten years ago I wrote a post that was strangely prescient,  a post about guns early the morning of the Sandy Hook shooting, before that tragedy had happened.

In the post, I told the story of a shopping expedition the night before and how it was difficult to find anyone to help me in the large sporting goods store — difficult until I wandered into the firearms department.

You can analyze it any way you will. You can pin it on our frontier mentality, on the myth of rugged individualism with which our nation has become entangled. You can bring politics in there too, although ten years ago we weren’t as polarized as we are now. 

But no matter how you attempt to explain it, there are 20 six- and seven-year-olds who never went home that horrible day, who never grew up, graduated from high school and got their first jobs. Families shattered, lives upended. 

We’ve endured legions of school shootings and other massacres since then, including Uvalde, where almost as many children lost their lives as at Sandy Hook. Ten years later, the tears that have fallen could fill another ocean. But still we do nothing.

Thoughts on the Fourth

Thoughts on the Fourth

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On one of my first trips abroad, the passengers in the airplane burst into applause when we landed back in the U.S. It wasn’t a difficult landing or an especially long flight. But it was a less jaded age, and I, novice flyer, started clapping, too.

I had more mixed feelings re-entering the U.S. a week ago. While we were away there were more mass shootings, several disturbing Supreme Court rulings (one of which produced equally disturbing vandalism at my Catholic church last week), and explosive testimony about the actions of our former president. 

I love my country, but three weeks away from it was refreshing. I read no newspapers, watched no televised news. I took a break from our Weltschmerz, an Old World term that has become a surprisingly apt way to describe our not-so-new problems. 

Tyranny, inequality and intolerance have always been with us. Many came here in hopes of escaping them. But they are part of the human conditions, and they have followed us here. 

In my optimistic moments I still think the grand experiment that is the United States of America can weather these difficult, polarizing times. But it will take our efforts and our prayers and our sacrifice to do so. I hope we are up to the task. 

Memorial Day x 2

Memorial Day x 2

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Today, Memorial Day falls on Memorial Day — May 30, that is. Perhaps it is doubly Memorial Day, then, Memorial Day x 2. 

I looked for photos of Washington, D.C., to celebrate the occasion and came up with these from a nighttime visit to the monuments with work colleagues in October of 2018. 

Notice how the emblems of our democracy shine out as darkness surrounds them. Perhaps a fitting metaphor for this day, this year. 

Russian Rhumba

Russian Rhumba

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We lost Dad eight years ago today. He was spared the pandemic, the University of Kentucky’s Thursday night loss to the St. Peter Peacocks in the first round of NCAA basketball, and now, the worst street fighting in Europe since World War II. 

I wondered this morning, what he would say about Ukraine? I imagine he would think we should be doing more, but he would also recognize the difficulty and delicacy of the U.S. position.

I do know he would be retelling one of his favorite WWII stories, about the time he visited Mirgorod as part of the shuttle bombing missions known as Operation Frantic. 

Dad was in the second of those runs, which departed England on June 21, 1944, part of a task force that included 114 B-17 bombers and 70 P-51 fighters, which Dad (and many others) called “little friends.” I probably owe my existence to these little friends since their addition to the war halted the unsustainable losses of the heavy bombers and their crews. 

Dad’s plane, part of the 95th Bomb Group, landed in Mirgorod, which, as Dad later wrote in an article he called “Russian Rhumba” published in a bomb group newsletter, proved to be a good decision. The 43 B-17s that landed in Poltava were destroyed in an overnight raid by the Luftwaffe, and, says Dad, “it didn’t take a Ph.D. in foreign affairs from Harvard to see the outrageous deception of our Russian allies.” 

Dad ended up flying deeper into the Ukrainian section of the Soviet Union, landing in what was then known as Kharkov and spending a few days with Russian soldiers. One of them “wanted to exchange firearms with me,” Dad wrote. “I was wearing a G.I. 45 and he was wearing a Russian issue. Needless to say, I had to say nyet to that proposal.”

Reading this story, so full of “Dad’isms” that make me smile and cry at the same time, is a good thing to do today, when our hearts reach out to the descendants of those people my father met so many years ago.

January 6th

January 6th

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It was only after I had posted yesterday that I remembered the date: January 6, the Epiphany, Little Christmas, a day set aside (by me, at least) to celebrate insight, discovery, the sudden revelation.

But since last year, January 6th has taken on a different meaning, one of anger and fear and ignominy. The opposite of light and wonder. 

You could say that last year’s January 6th was a revelation. It revealed a dark truth about this nation. But I’d rather keep the day free of politics, let it stay in my mind the capstone of the season, a day to reflect with hope on the year just dawning. 

Twenty Years

Twenty Years

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When I visited Lexington last month, Phillip drove me through the University of Kentucky campus. He  wanted to show me that the twin towers were gone. Not those twin towers, though Phillip saw those come down, too. He was working in New York at the time, his office less than two miles north on Hudson. But it was the absence of the Kirwan-Blanding Towers he wanted to show me, two 23-floor dormitories that housed students for almost 50 years and that came down carefully, a floor at a time.

Not so with those other towers, of course, which pancaked to the ground 20 years ago today, taking the lives of almost 2,700 with them. As is so often the case, we hadn’t known what we had until we lost it. We also hadn’t known that terrorists with fake IDs were learning how to fly planes — but not to land them. There was ignorance within our innocence. Perhaps there must always be.

In the days and weeks that followed 9/11, I cooked up a storm. I made bacon-and-egg breakfasts, chopped vegetables for stews and soups. I drug out the crockpot and pressed it into service. I was making food for the bereaved and serving it to my family. It felt like a way to heal.

But that was long ago. Our problems have metastasized. The terrorism is still present but now we also have a pandemic, climate change disasters, and an ignominious end to the war we started to avenge the 9/11 attacks. So many challenges … and so little consensus on how to deal with them.

Ten years ago, I wrote that our children grew up in a different world. Now my children have children. What kind of world will they inherit?