Habit
I bought a new American flag. The old one was torn, tattered, and discolored on the edges from the metal pole. My Boy Scout training kicked in: old flags should be replaced, then “retired” with dignity. There’s a box at City Hall where you can drop them off for the local Scout troop. They’ll perform the appropriate ritual to lay this Old Glory to rest.
Recently, I got out of the habit of flying the American flag. It’s been a struggle to support an America whose government seems so hell bent on destroying everything I think it should stand for. But the flag is out there right now – new, clean and proud; baking in the summer sun this day before the Fourth of July.
What changed? Well first of all it’s my abject stubbornness. I refuse to allow this symbol of all that I think is good in America to be plagiarized by those who wish to change it for the bad. So let folks drive by our house and wonder – was there some political conversion of Biblical proportion on Linda Avenue in Pataskala? Did Dahlman move?
It’s not flying from the bed of the pickup truck (yes, we have one of those too, part of the whole Lost Dog story). And it is funny, as I write this essay, the flag itself is a topic on the morning news. Wes Moore, the Governor of Maryland, a Democrat and an African American, is refusing to “concede patriotism” to the current President. I guess I’m not the only one.
More Perfect
It’s my America too. And I can continue to hope that we are the same nation that those conflicted patriots of 1776 called for: one of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Founding Fathers knew full well their own contradictions: the “all men are created equal” of Jefferson’s pen were really twenty-one years or older white men who owned property. James Madison summed it up best a decade later in the Preamble to the Constitution. It was his use of the grammatically awkward “more perfect union”, that created the grist for high school debates for the next 240 years. What is “more perfect”?
Our current government demonstrates that we aren’t anywhere near perfect yet. And I can see why many are giving up on the “American Dream”. Some are simply withdrawing from public life, climbing into a turtle shell of protection. They live safely in their “bubbles” of political silence, never reaching out, never standing up. They huddle beneath the storm, just as we are huddling in the air conditioning, waiting for this first summer blast of our “climate changed” environment to pass. (It doesn’t help that it’s going to be 95 degrees Fahrenheit today. We now have a new measurement, the “feels like” scale, a heat index which will reach 105. Knowing that information doesn’t make it “feel” any better!)
Defending Justice
But there are still those with hope. I listened to Jack Smith being interviewed for the first time last night. Jack Smith – the last Special Prosecutor before the second Trump era. The man who had the audacity to think that even a former President should adhere to the law. The attorney who has the most reason to be “in a shell”; he indicted Donald Trump for national security violations, and for conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. He is a “prime target” for Trump’s pledge to get “retribution”.
And yet he’s out there, talking. He’s not a politician, nor is he auditioning for a show on MS-NOW. He’s trying to defend the institution he knows best, the Department of Justice. Not the current, Todd Blanche-led institution of revenge. Not the one indicting an American Olympic rowing champion for picking up a piece of lining from the Reflecting Pool. And, not the Justice Department obfuscating and lying to Federal Judges about the location and actions of detained undocumented people.
Jack Smith is defending those who remain in Justice, doing “the good work” of protecting Americans from crime and terrorism. He stands up for all of those thousands of lawyers who are, in many cases, the last barricade against real danger and damage. And he’s doing it at risk to himself, raising his own visibility as a target for Mr. Blanche.
Jack Smith is a patriot in the clearest sense. He is risking everything for the Nation that he believes America should be.
How can we shrink in the face of his courage? Jack Smith risks the entire might of the American justice system falling on his back. The least we can do is defend our own right to fly the flag, to see and work for the America we believe in.
The Fourth
It’s the Fourth of July tomorrow, the 250th anniversary of our Independence. In this time of peril to our American ideals, who better to look to then Jack Smith. He stands for what America should be. And, on the Fourth of July, who better to quote than Abraham Lincoln, who understood America’s destiny perhaps better than anyone else.
…It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
Happy Birthday America.
