Upset
The battle of Yorktown is marked as the victory that ended the American Revolution, and began the American experiment in democracy. (Yes, I know that it was two more years before a treaty actually ending the war – but Yorktown was the reason the treaty was signed). It was an overwhelming “upset”, to use a sports analogy. It was like my alma mater, Denison University beating Ohio State on the football field, or the Toledo Mud Hens defeating the New York Yankees in baseball. The British Army was perhaps the strongest in the world, and the British Navy was definitely the best.
But that didn’t matter; General Cornwallis got his British forces backed into a corner. And the British Navy wasn’t at the battle, the French Navy was. They blocked Cornwallis from any extraction by sea. After days of siege warfare, the unthinkable finally happened. A white flag flew from the parapet, and Cornwallis marched his troops out to surrender. But he couldn’t accept the loss himself, he sent his second in command to offer his sword to General Washington.
Washington, the consummate military man, was always aware of protocol. He instructed his second-in-command, General Benjamin Lincoln (no relation to Abraham), to accept the symbolic gesture. As the British stacked their weapons and marched into captivity, their pipers played the old English ballad, “The World Turned Upside Down”.
Today
The world feels pretty upside down today.
The former Prime Minister of Japan was assassinated, shot in the back with a homemade gun. If that happened here in the US, it would be just “another brick in the wall” in this summer of mass shootings. But in Japan, you can count the number of deaths from gun violence for a year on one hand. Nothing more powerful, or cowardly, than an assassin with a plastic sawed-off shotgun.
Thirty years after the end of the Cold War, the United States is again leading a coalition of forces to oppose Russia. A smaller democratic state, Ukraine, is under mass attack. Instead of letting the Russian autocrat Putin exercise his will un-challenged, the US is doing everything short of direct warfare to stop him. It’s one of the few things that most Americans actually agree on.
That’s because the democracy that Washington helped create is also now under siege. The essential tenet of our government, that the most votes wins, is under attack. Perhaps as many as thirty percent of Americans believe that an election was stolen. They think that Joe Biden usurped his position illegally, and that their only vindication is to “change the rules” so that they can decide the winner regardless of the vote count.
Trust No One
Our nation with all its blemishes and flaws, for more than half a century stood, “as the shining city on the hill” for the world. It seems to be a bit dimmer right now. We didn’t create the “post-truth” world, but our nation fully practices “post-truth”. And its American companies: Facebook and Twitter, Apple, Microsoft and Google, that intentionally or not, are the mechanisms of spreading the lies.
How crazy is this: on the next update for my brand new IPhone (13 mini), Apple will offer a switch that will guarantee my phone cannot be hacked. I guess that’s a good thing – but that also means the courts, the police, the FBI can’t get in my phone either. I have nothing to hide on my phone, or computer, or anywhere else. If the FBI needs to get into my phone, it’s probably because something bad happened to me. But if I flick that switch – it erases itself rather than “give up” data. And yet I’m still tempted to “protect” myself.
And what’s even more confusing, is that both sides, “MAGA” or “Blue”, would agree to that. There is fear of an unformed “them” that requires protection.
Moral Arc
Dr. King often used the phrase, “The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice”. For most of my lifetime, it’s felt like we could actually see “the bend”, as it arced towards more freedom for Americans. But in recent years it seems like the arc just goes off into an unseen universe, far from a final just landing. Much of the work that so many Americans have done to bend it, seems to be lost. Whether it’s about race, or gender, or identity; the America of today is less just than at any time that my sixty-five years can remember.
The world feels upside down.
Struggle
The American Revolution was a protracted struggle. It took six long years from the town squares of Lexington and Concord to the white flag of Yorktown. And for most of those years, the Continental Army lost. They lost at Lexington and Concord, they lost at Brooklyn and Harlem, they lost Philadelphia, they lost 10,000 troops under Benjamin Lincoln who surrendered Charleston, just a year before Yorktown. They suffered through the harsh winter of 1777-78 at Valley Forge, and three other winters in the nearby Watchung Mountains of Western New Jersey.
Washington knew that the ultimate goal was for his army to survive. Survive long enough that the British ran out of patience, and money, to maintain occupations forces. Survive by avoiding a cataclysmic final battle, a “Gettysburg” that risked his entire force. Washington kept his Army alive and fighting, for six long years, until he finally could capitalize on a British mistake. The arc of his mission finally bent towards victory.
It feels like we are in a time of decision, of determining whether our world will remain upside down, or whether we will find a way to right ourselves, and our nation. It’s not time for the white flags, or to give up our swords. Like Washington and his second-in-command Lincoln, it’s time to redouble our efforts, so that we can drown out the British pipers with our own ditty, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
