Let America Be America Again

Let America Be America Again
Presented by Robin McNallie and Chris Edwards
July 6, 2008

Readings:

This reading is from the poem by Langston Hughes:

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. . .

From The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 1994 the Estate of Langston Hughes.

This is from the poem by Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
— Emma Lazarus

…It never was America to me.

SERVICE

Once long ago, from the Staten Island ferry, I saw the face of the Statue of Liberty up fairly close. I don’t know how she looked to the three of my four grandparents who I think first saw America from the NY harbor, but I saw a very plain kind of beauty in this Goddess: not glamorous, no warrior queen; simply the one who held out this thing – liberty – as ours for the taking, plain and of infinite value.

From the deck of the Queen Mary 2, sailing East in 2006, I saw the setting sun make Lady Liberty’s newly-cleaned torch shimmer.

In the late winter in Harrisonburg, when you drive past Liberty Tax Service, you might see someone in a plastic crown and pale green robe parading up and down the parking lot, waving a plastic torch at traffic. When it’s chilly, her gestures look frantic. She runs, to cope with the dampness and cold.

What’s her story? (Let me try to guess.) Is she running as fast as she can to keep food on her kids’ table, worrying how those kids are doing alone in a rickety trailer, praying the old heap she drives will get her home to them that night? Could she in fact be an immigrant –one of your tired, your poor? Maybe even undocumented?

Or, could we see this Lady Liberty as an entrepreneur, owning the tax service franchise, working with near-superhuman energy for the American Dream.

Or could she be ALL the above?

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear. — Walt Whitman

What is the American Dream, anyway?
Why a name like “Liberty Tax Service”?

Well, many Americans associate liberty with tax reduction.
We hate paying taxes.

And we keep seeing the words Liberty, and Freedom, when we SHOP; meaning choices among flavors, colors, fat content.

As freedom is a breakfastfood – e.e. cummings

What more?

Don’t “liberty” and “freedom” go naturally with the big land that our forbears found– Florida alligators, the surf at Hatteras; Niagara Falls, the ridge of old green mountains running past our Valley and North-South for 2,000 miles; the Mississippi River; the Great Plains where you can see storms moving from miles away; the new, sharp, snow-capped ridges of the Rockies (only 65-million years old); mesas, tumbleweed and the shifting colors of the desert; pelicans and thousands of gulls on the Pacific shore?

No wonder they saw its resources as infinite. No wonder we became an optimistic people with a can-do spirit.
The land was ours before we were the land’s. She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people.
Robert Frost

Children, beware when they call you America’s most valuable resource. Look what they’re doing with the rest of ‘em.’
–Utah Phillips

My father was an atom of dust,
My mother a straw in the wind,
To his serene majesty. . .
But in the light of the Liberty torch
The atom of dust became a man
And the straw in the wind became a woman
For the first time. . .
I am proud of my past.
I am proud of my future.
I am an American.
–Elias Lieberman

But you know, the famous 1907 photo of immigrants by Alfred Stieglitz, titled “Steerage,” actually shows them heading for Europe – GOING BACK. Many did.

I confess I have not always been proud to be an American. Two years ago, my last and longest time spent outside this country, I purposely stayed away from news about it – Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless surveillance, waterboarding, MACACA.

Democracy is a story of narrow escapes.
—Bill Moyers

I was flattered when an innkeeper asked if I was Australian. Back here, I’d met some inspiring peacebuilders from around the world, and found that they see Americans as very powerful. They say, “You are part of the world’s Number 1 superpower, and fortunate enough to live in A DEMOCRACY! When will you fix it?” That made me feel all the more powerless.

We all learned in school, and it’s true, how America was started by adventurers seeking freedom, launching this audacious experiment based on principles of the Enlightenment, of government by the people; of inalienable rights.

We’re often in denial about the under-side – those adventurers’ Original Sins:

This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
—Vine Victor Deloria, Junior (a Standing Rock Sioux)

Slaves building our nation’s capital: what good can come of such a place?
—Abigail Adams

“In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation… even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.” — from the law of the Iroquois

Where has that idea gone? Now, we reward politicians for not thinking beyond THIS election cycle; and businesses for thinking only about THIS quarter’s profit.

What, to the slave, is the 4th of July? – Frederick Douglass

Once, maybe ten years ago when we had this holiday service here, a young woman asked what the 4th of July could mean to African Americans such as herself. I forget if we had any answers.

Americans are generous. A speaker at the Rotary said the average American gives 3 1/2 times as much to charity as the average French citizen, seven times as much as the average German, 14 times as much as the average Italian.

But does that prove our superior generosity? Or do people in those other countries plan more collectively, and pay more taxes for the common good?

Americans hate paying taxes.
(Remember the Boston Tea Party?)

I come out of a restaurant with a sandwich in a styrofoam box. A homeless man asks if I can spare him a bite. I hand it to him. He says “God bless.” I feel good. But wouldn’t HE feel better if his community, or country, gave him a hands-up so he wouldn’t need to beg? –  Know what I heard about the Haligonians?

–  Haligonians? What kind of foreigners are they?

–  People in Halifax, Canada. I heard they have an excellent hospital in their city that is all paid for by taxpayers. And they don’t mind paying, because whenever one of them needs to go there, it’s free.

–  Socialism!

Unitarian Universalism has been called the most American religion, since it isn’t bound to one faith tradition but draws from them all. America’s culture, our traditions, come from around the world. Like it or not, we’re multicultural. Check our foods; listen to our stories; music; place names; look at our religions.

But are human beings capable of handling that? Check the venom that tears up our airwaves.

Americans can so easily go through life knowing no other language and practically nothing about the rest of the world.

In Manassas, way back when the Beatles were together, I had a neighbor from Liverpool. A woman in town asked my neighbor where she was from. She replied, England. The woman said, “For a foreigner, you talk English pretty good.”

We hardly ever heard foreign languages in Manassas then. That’s in Prince William County, now making news with its campaign targeting illegal immigration.

Don’t give us your tired, your poor.

Americans cling to the myth that we are a classless society. We don’t want to hear of widening gaps. I think most of us call ourselves middle class. The rich pretend they’re reg’lar folks, and to call someone “poor” is an insult.

Even in the Great Depression, when Studs Terkel interviewed people who were out of work and hungry, most of them felt it was their fault.

The book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” talks about how this affects our democracy. If I was poor, and lived in some other country, I might join a union or vote for leftists. But as a loyal American, how could I wage class warfare against the owner of the factory where I worked? Chances are I’d look up to him. We Americans hate “elitists,” but the talk-shows teach us who those elitists are: intellectuals, NPR listeners, latte drinkers. Not billionaires, like my boss that owns the factory would be!  Maybe I’d support the tax cuts he gets. I’d say he’s lived the American Dream. That he’s where I just might one day be, or at least my children might, if they try hard enough.

We’ve become a very wishing nation.
—James Howard Kunstler

We militantly prevent abortions, at the same time denying any collective responsibility for children once they’re born.

We zealously keep a brain-dead patient biologically alive, but let an estimated 18,000 people die each year for lack of health care.

We keep filling prisons with our War on Drugs …
while commercials keep telling us about new disorders and new drugs to “ask your doctor” about.

We hate paying taxes, but spend $11 million an hour in Iraq.

If honesty were introduced into American life, everything would collapse.
— George Carlin

America ranks fifth worldwide for its rate of executions and number 1 in our rate of imprisonment. Does this mean we have the most bad people?

Can we believe that and be patriotic?

What is patriotism?   Can it be a good thing?
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. – Mark Twain

When my son Eddie was in about 5th grade, he refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The principal sent a note home. Eddie told me, “The Pledge says ‘liberty and justice for all,’ but we don’t have that.” I suggested to him that those words meant the direction of America’s journey, not that we had gotten there. So he dropped his brave young rebellion – THAT time. Each of us was half right. I do think of America as “the dream the dreamers dreamed” – like the Langston Hughes poem says – but I regret now that I failed to encourage my child’s stand for conscience.

(I’m grateful that he’s still rebellious, anyway.)

Some churches call the flag-salute ritual “idolatry.” I am glad this congregation decided, a few years ago, not to install a large flag at a prominent position in our sanctuary, because I think in a sense those churches are right. When we draft Constitutional amendments against flag-burning while we trash the Bill of Rights, our patriotism is an empty shell. Idolatry.

In any mind that has a pennyworth of imagination, patriotism produces a good attitude towards foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realise that other men, no less rightly, love theirs? Once you have realised that Frenchmen like cafe’ complet just as we like bacon and eggs–why good luck to them and let them have it.
–C.S. Lewis (a foreigner)

For a character whose loyalty serves as a metaphor for GOOD patriotism, we might look to Cordelia. Shakespeare shows Cordelia’s father, King Lear, asking each of his daughters how much they love him before he divides his estate. The two greedy sisters pile on the flattery, making Cordelia, the only true loyal one, sound blunt:

I love your majesty
According to my bond, no more or less.

You know the rest. Of course, it’s a tragedy.

The old king shows about as much sense as some of our radio personalities when they bloviate about patriotism.

We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.
— Abraham Lincoln

There are hopeful things in America.

The French parliament may pass legislation that would affect the fashion industry, making it a serious crime “to publicly incite extreme thinness.” In Germany, someone can go to prison for publicly denying the Holocaust happened. There are many such well-meaning laws in other democracies that wouldn’t fly in America.

“We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.” – Thomas Jefferson

There’s an old car in Hburg that has every inch of its surface plastered with two flag-images: the American, and the Confederate battle flag. To me, that seems ridiculous – but how many countries that have defeated an insurrection go on to see a host of diehards flapping their flags for it, 140 years later? And TOLERATE them?

…to tolerate any error…

That freedom is something to love our country for. If only we didn’t link it with the freedom to carry our guns everywhere, and roar through the wilderness in our 4 wheel drives…and MY freedom to build a business on MY property that spews out poisons.

Fareed Zakaria, from Newsweek, wrote in his book, The Post-American World,

“The world’s tallest building is in Taipei…Its largest publicly traded company is in Beijing…The largest casino is in Macao. America no longer dominates even its favorite sport, shopping. The Mall of America in Minnesota once boasted it was the largest shopping mall in the world. Today it wouldn’t make the top ten. Only two of the world’s ten richest people are American. These lists are arbitrary and a bit silly, but only ten years ago, the United States would have serenely topped almost every one of these categories.”

Must we miss that?

Well – I like living in our NEIGHBORHOOD. And I’m glad it is NOT one of the wealthiest in town, or gated.

Zakaria (an American born in India) is optimistic. He doesn’t see what’s happening as the decline of America, but as the “rise of the rest.”

Environmentalist Bill McKibben is also optimistic. In a column titled “End of the Open Road: The Land Of The Perpetual Frontier Meets $4-A-Gallon Gas,” he says we must get over our obsession with sprawling out and driving everywhere, but thinks that could enhance our quality of life.

Some predict that by 2050, America will be a majority-minority nation. Our non-Hispanic, white population will drop below 50%. How will that change us? Is the prospect scary, or could it make us MORE “American”? My grandkids will be the age I am now. The change is happening faster for their generation. Will they cope with diversity better? I hope so.

I do feel more pride in my country, lately, than I’d felt in a while. I have taken heart in seeing so many Americans caring and taking part in this year’s election process, especially the young.

Democracy is a story of narrow escapes.

Maybe when things have been bad enough for long enough, we get comfortable with cynicism — like an old shoe. But I do feel hope for those who come after us.

O, let America be America again–
The land that never has been yet–
And yet must be