Happy 241 Birthdays, America:
Celebrating the 4th During “This Period of Absence of American Leadership”
For several years, I commuted between the west coast and the east coast; I recall flying west over America on the weekend of the 4th of July on a Friday evening flight. Time seemed suspended as the inky night sky hung above us but stayed tinged with a deep gold and rose on the western horizon. I would look out the window for hours, flying high above America the Beautiful, at fireworks displays unfolding from east to west. Some were tiny in the small towns where I could imagine a parade of family wagons and kids waving flags. Some were probably huge from the ground, hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on massive displays of patriotism. But from up there in the sky, they were all kind of small. American sparkled a little more than usual, but I knew in the dark underneath, the purple mountains’ majesty and the great plains were really what took my breath away.
America’s birthday party…
… where we all dress in red-white and blue, we run for the best remaining spots on the parade route and we respect the claims of temporary ownership from the people who put their blankets out the night before. We smile a little more than usual as we listen to the high school band play “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” as they stride by, a little less polished than they will be by Homecoming but a little more enthusiastic since the team is together for the one day of summer.
We celebrate our confused and naive collective self, the one that only we can understand, where protecting our freedom to worship is on equal footing with protecting our right to bear arms, where a free press seems to prompt the powerful to hide things and free speech has come to mean that we can insult each other.
We celebrate our birthday with flags and picnics and pie and explosives.
It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up in this magical, childlike, complicated, frustrating democracy. It’s always ironic — our national obsession with explosives at a birthday party — but this year it’s all just really strange.
All week I’ve been thinking about the 4th of July and how to appropriately “celebrate” it this year. Many have mused in social media, “does anyone else feel kind of sad this year?” and “it doesn’t feel like we should have a party…” This holiday, usually filled with parades and bands and picnics and fireworks, is intended to be a celebration of the best in us, the birthday of a country built on the foundation of crazy dreamers who believed, that in the face of the steepest odds, they could build a more perfect union.
For them, “more perfect” was defined by justice, tranquility, peace, welfare and liberty.
I don’t know about you, but the last year has felt like anything but.
Our civil rights are under attack. We seem to assume the worst in each other. We’ve seen a rise in hate crimes. We have isolated ourselves in a world where the only solution to making things better seems like it should be human connection. The White House is committed to tearing apart families, destroying the good of the administration that came before, ripping healthcare from millions, eliminating the use of the apology from everyday life and basically doing whatever it takes to win in some game where it isn’t even clear to the rest of us what winning means.
As I listened to the birds on this early July morning, in honor of the 4th, I started thinking about the U.S. Constitution.
This beautiful little document and I have rekindled our relationship in the last year. Late last July I watched Khizr Khan hold his copy of it high in the air in honor of his son and in defiance of the Republican nominee. I immediately went on-line and ordered a copy of the Constitution and had it sent directly to Trump Tower. I posted a picture of the confirmation and lo and behold other people started doing it too. I’ve ordered several hundred copies since then. I personally delivered one to Trump Tower last August (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmOAe9sYW7w). I’ve given copies to bartenders and foreign visitors, to strangers and friends, and I’m arming myself with a whole bunch as I go to our town’s 4th of July parade today.
It’s the Constitution that we should be celebrating today.
I’ve been feeling kind of hopeless lately as our President becomes more and more unhinged, as he rattles his saber, plays golf and cyber-bullies women. What do I do? How do I continue to fight? He’s actually not the real enemy — he is a convenient weapon in the arsenal of the real bad guys, the people who are trying to take this country for all its worth. We are David versus the Koch Brothers’ Goliath, their wealthy billionaire cabal, and their lobbyists, all with bottomless financial resources they are willing to use to take over this country, to dismantle the structures that protect the masses and to manipulate a public that is too busy living our lives to notice or care or even know how to pick up whatever the materials we need to make our slingshot.
But we have a slingshot. And oh, is it a good one.
“We the people…. do ordain and establish….”
I am an American.
I am “we the people.”
I am a Citizen.
This is my slingshot.
So this 4th of July, I’m calling a timeout, a timeout inspired by my early morning reading — again — of our U.S. Constitution.
In the last six months I have felt stress and have more gray hair than in the previous five decades of my life. I worry about everything from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep. Time has never moved so slowly, knowing it’s one more day with this naive, narcissistic President who is getting played from every direction (from the Russians, from #presidentbannon, from the Koch brothers) and is meanwhile playing us with his heartless mindless tweets and terrible rants.
I’m done with him. I’m done with them. I’m taking back my power.
Armed with my slingshot, as of right now, I’m changing the way I fight.
No more 24 hour news cycles about the Bully-in-Chief.
No more worrying about whether my tea party Congressman shows up or not — he won’t. And he will probably lose his election in 2018. My job is to speak up, to share my perspective as a concerned citizen and to vote. His job is to show up, to listen to the people who pay his salary whether he agrees with them or not, and to live by the framework laid out in the Constitution. So far, he’s not doing that.
No more worrying that the dismantlers in the Trump Administration are going to win. Thanks to the genius of our 18h century founding fathers, our set-up has three branches. I’ve been far too focused on the one that has really, really let us down — Congress, and in this case, the Congressional majority.
They have failed. Miserably.
The Republicans have a majority in both houses; they own the White House and the country is filled with Republican governors. And yet they have failed to deliver anything good. They showed their true colors when they began the new term with a secret effort to overthrow their own ethics oversight. We should have known then what lay ahead.
So instead, we need to depend a little more on the judicial branch. The heroes of the early days of the Trump Administration were the 9th Circuit who served as the conscience of this country, seeing the travel ban for what it was and forcing change. It’s not over, but thanks to the judicial branch, there is reason to believe that not all is lost. Just this week, the courts halted more environmental corruption from EPA Chief Scott Pruitt who seems bent on destroying the planet. Congressional Republicans —a surprisingly spineless bunch now that they said no for seven years and apparently lost skills they once had when it came to governing — should be ashamed of the last six months. But the courts have given us a sliver of hope, despite the best efforts of the so-called President.
No more worrying about our collective civil rights. The Bill of Rights is still the Bill of Rights. And whether or not it’s OK to refuse people a wedding cake (it shouldn’t be), the bigger point is that we are all created equal and we all have a right to the same protections under the law. I still believe in our judicial branch. And funnily enough, they’re getting an assist from the most surprising place: so far, 44 states have said no to some part of the “election commission” request (way to go, Secretaries of State!).
No more days of watching the President humiliate and embarrass his own family, let alone this country.
Poor Melania. Can you imagine how awful it must be for such a seemingly shy person to take on a single issue, speak up about it and then have any remaining credibility decimated by one ugly tweet about a woman who didn’t have a facelift? The President can’t even respect his own wife.
Poor Ivanka. Can you imagine how embarrassing it must be for her, when she makes so much noise about how her father “supports women” and at every turn he cuts a budget for a program supporting women (if he even knows he did is beyond me) or fails to offer even a handshake?
Poor Jared. The lack of ethics that landed his father in jail seems to have been passed down to another generation. It seems like he didn’t even know it was wrong to mix up financial transactions in his own business with the business of the United States. Maybe he was never taught right from wrong.
No more anger. I’m converting it into pity...
… pity for the Trump family and their terrible hypocrisy and lack of ethics.
… pity for the Speaker of the House who didn’t want the job in the first place and got played in a White House Rose Garden photo opp, celebrating a preliminary “victory” of a tax cut disguised as a healthcare bill which if successful will succeed only in hurting millions of Americans and the Aenate described as “dead on arrival.”
… pity for the White House communications staff who sold their souls long ago and now speak to an audience of one instead of doing their jobs speaking to the American people.
No more falling into the trap that America is defined by the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Don’t get me wrong. In no way am I saying that I will spend any less energy on the fight or the resistance. I’ve just decided to re-channel it.
Because I still believe in the Constitution. I still believe in the decency and good intent of the average Americans… not the ones with political turf at stake, but the ones who are trying to make a better life for their families, lend a hand to neighbors in need and pursue their faith in a peaceful, accepting place.
Earlier this week on the news I saw a picture of President Obama in Indonesia, on the other side of the world. It was a quiet story, with just one still photo. I looked closely and saw a patriotic American, smiling happily in a land far away, quietly speaking up about the future of the planet. In the still frame, with his quote beside it, the 44th president showed more leadership in a few small words than the sitting so-called “president” could say in a thousand 140-character twitter rants.
Obama was commenting on the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. He referred to now as “this period of absence of American leadership.” The precision and power in his carefully chosen phrase prompted a lightening bolt of insight for me.
As we contemplate our democracy on this 4th of July, I realize that we are not celebrating just our 241st birthday. Instead, we are celebrating the 240 years that led up to now, the 240 years that established the foundation and, I hope, gave us the fortitude to live through this period. While I feel more sadness than I expected to as I look at the flag hanging outside our front door, I also feel a sense of quiet power that comes from the realization that Trump represents only one thing: the absence of American leadership.
Our first chance to fix this is in November of 2018. It’s only 16 months away. If the next 16 are anything like the first 6, it won’t be easy but resistance is possible. It is powerful. It is exhausting. But it is real.
Today, because of what we’re fighting, the parades should mean more, the children waving flags should mean more, and the protests should mean more. There is a group marching in the Illinois 6th who are protesting our current Congressman. In their organizational communication they emphasize that their group will dress and march “respectfully.” This is what should scare the incumbents.
The land of the free and the home of the brave is under pressure.
Because of the absence of American leadership.
But perhaps they forgot the free and the brave?
We the people started it and we the people can fix it. Donald Trump (who lost the popular vote, no matter what his “election commission” says) is but a pothole on the journey of this democracy. We put him there, but potholes get patched. And eventually roads get rebuilt, or rerouted.
The road to 2018 will go through small towns and large cities, it will circumvent the diversions and tweets, it will include everyone from the newest registered voter to the Greatest Generation. It will require brotherhood and understanding. We must not say “I told you so” but rather we need to say, “come with me if you need a ride to the polls.”
Happy 241st birthday, America. We kind of screwed it up this time around, but the time has come to take it back. Grab your metaphorical slingshots, turn off the news and don’t retweet anything that comes from @realdonaldtrump. The best way to fight a narcissist is to pretend he doesn’t exist. Don’t give him the time of day. Don’t pay him any attention. Ignore him.
Address your concerns to someone who can do something about it.
We must make the next 16 months about the good and decency of America, about respect for each other and the freedom to choose our press, our faith and our speech.
This is not Trump’s America. It is not my America. It is our America.
It is the collection of the 240 birthdays that went before that we should celebrate today.
