There is a loud and powerful chorus in America today, a refrain that I’m sure has been heard before and will probably and unfortunately, sound again. It is a simple but sad phrase that stains our Independence Day celebrations.
Take our Country Back.
It is the song of the angry and despairing, the hopeless and helpless. It is possible, I suppose that these words are not just political posturing, opportunism, but spoken sincerely, even honestly, from true concern and heartfelt fear.
But these words are wrong. Every single one wrong. Wrong because they are against what America is and should be.
Beginning with back.
Back from what? From rightly, democratically, legitimately elected leadership? Back from anyone who disagrees with my particular viewpoint, stand, position? Validating the rights of opposing ideas to exist and daring to share power with them is exactly the point of open democracy, is it not? America has never been just one place, one thing, one idea. America is built on the very truth of many ideas and the mutual search for the common, the shared, the whole. A different direction cannot be, ipso facto, a wrong direction in America, much less an evil one. It’s just a different one, and no ground for violence, notional or actual.
America is not a favored toy to be fought over in the nursery.
Because it can never be ours.
There is no ours in America. There is a my, a personal patriotism, an ownership of citizenship, duty, responsibility. But there is no ours, no single group of any ilk to which America only belongs, no group or groups with whom it can never be shared. Ours is a great obscenity in a nation of Immigrants, founded by pilgrims unwelcomed and discarded by other nations, ours cannot be claimed by a people carrying the guilt of what was done to the only native peoples who could fairly speak the word ours. What makes this America is precisely the fact that we do not belong here, that we have created a place for all others who do not belong, anywhere, either, who seek with us the freedom to have a home and live a life as best they can.
Which leaves the ugliest word of all. Take.
It is the essential error of human philosophy that we value force above all, that we equate ferocity with strength. In response to threat, apprehension, or loss, there must be force. I cannot have, so I will take. It is the very sin that defines humanity, the very wrong that destroys good everywhere. The loss is not merely to humility or civility, though both are surely destroyed. No, our loss is the loss of Grace, of faith in the larger arc of history and in the God who surely blesses this nation and all it stands for.
For there is not one good thing, of America or of any other thing, that comes from force. What is noble and right comes only by sacrifice, by the gift of self and the hope that it conveys, whether on a green in Lexington or a cross on Calvary or a local polling place. From force comes tyranny, pain and destruction, comes death and end. From giving comes greatness, future, grace.
Those who would take America would destroy her. And that is not the Independence day which I will celebrate this July 4th.
In angry voices today I hear a demand for freedom of a wrong kind, for Independence from the very ideals and responsibilities that define this nation and everything that is good about it. If freedom only means a for-profit-free-for-all or the blind and unworthy pursuit of power at the expense of person or creation, then they have won the day. They have taken America back.
May the God who has so richly blessed this nation grant us freedom from that.
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