The view from the porch...

From where I sit, the flag on our porch droops in the late afternoon of this Fourth of July.

One can’t look at it for more than a moment without reflecting, as have many before me, on its meaning and its cost. Wars, causes, lives, the hopes that sugar forward both the life of a nation and the lives of its citizens, the declaration, that singular Declaration of Independence, that all those years ago set it all in motion, commemorated today, as it has been for two centuries and more, in the words of the prescient John Adams, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other” — all measured in what is right now, on my porch, on this July 4, 2008, a languid field of red, white and blue.

Some in Washington some years ago saw in that same starred banner a call to arms, counting more on ruse than right that those easily led would sheepishly follow, and, more cynically still, that those easily swayed would saunter behind. All too unhappily, they were at once right and so wrong, and as a people we all bear the consequences, in the form of diminished respect among our friends, increased hatred among our enemies, a loss everywhere of the uniquely human hopes and dreams woven into every inch of the fabric that is our shared history.

The current resident of the White House can, in language both verbal and physical, bloviate, as he so often does and did so again today from the portico of Monticello, about the virtues of liberty. But he himself, who in his youth so famously signed in liberty's name only to infamously sidestep its defense, lacks virtue. Easy it is to wrap one's cause, however ill-imagined and self-serving, in a flag reddened by lives lost in its name; easy it is to snatch from the world its shroud of sympathy in the wake of 9/11 and to use it, callously, to shroud one's own oedipal quest for glory. Harder still to lift from its ashes a nation wronged, to rise above the hatred that so obviously fed that wrong, to twin grief to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," to truly make might equal to right.

Instead, here we all are, deep in the afternoon of this Fourth, long in the coming night of this most disappointing presidency, many, if not most, of us contemplating a different dawn.

And perhaps, just perhaps, the way forward lies in, of all things, following the flag.

Now by that I do not mean the blind adherence to the jingoism that has led us into this, our current, epochal dead end. Rather, I mean a new beginning, not just a blind eye to our historical inheritance, but a re-dedication to the sacrifice inherent in stars, the values intrinsic in stripes — to nothing less than a rebirth of liberty bought at such a cost by those before us, of whom so much was so often asked, by whom so much was so often given.

All of us, you, me, our families, friends, neighbors, can, if we wish, be the people those vaunted forefathers wanted us to be; can, if we want, subscribe again to what Jefferson termed the "unalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; can, if we we choose, remind ourselves, as the author of the Declaration did, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

I exhort you, my friends, to wish, want and choose, and to do so wisely.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon