My Country, Tisafee
Nov. 4th, 2004 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonThere's been a ton written the last few days about this election, but I couldn't write about it. It was too enormous, the pain too deep. I still can't really write about it—besides, others have stated all the things I'm thinking and feeling already and with more presence of mind and eloquence. About all I can manage right now is an anecdote.
Yesterday morning as I drove into work I was depressed, but was maintaining all right. Then the local radio station played some bridging music between one NPR story and the next—a slow-moving, almost elegiac, instrumental version of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." I lost it—just started bawling. I don't think I have ever cried over an election before, and I'm really not a weepy-waily sort, but that got through all my defenses.
I flashed back to learning that song in school at a very tender age—was it kindergarten or first grade? Early, anyway. Learned by rote, of course, so the words didn't always make sense—kind of like the Pledge of Allegiance. My ear heard the first bit as "My Country, Tisafee." And I remember singing it and thinking, "Tisafee? I thought I lived in America."
And that's what I've been thinking all day. I thought I lived in America.
You know the place? Sweet land of liberty? Where my fathers died? The Bush Administration says they love America and they love liberty—but I ask you, what is it they love about America if not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? Because they sure seem determined to trample those into the ground. True liberty is not about forcing everyone to think as you do, do as you do, about trying to tell others what to believe and feel, what to do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own homes. True liberty is not about licentiousness, either. It's about being allowed to make up your own mind about things and to act on your decisions—an' it harm none.
I do love my country. It is the land where my fathers died—all the way back to the Revolution and beyond. My mothers were living and dying here, too. I've got a long-lived stake in how things go here. I think it's worth fighting for. But it looks like this fight for the soul of our nation is going to be a long, hard struggle. And it looks like one side is paying a lot of lip service to liberty while practicing repression.
Tuesday enough people voted their fears to make the rest of us good and scared. But good and angry, too.
I live in America. Until they haul me off to the Re-education Camps I'll keep fighting to preserve the liberty that I grew up singing about. It is sweet—and like all sweet things, once you've tasted it, you only want more.
Yesterday morning as I drove into work I was depressed, but was maintaining all right. Then the local radio station played some bridging music between one NPR story and the next—a slow-moving, almost elegiac, instrumental version of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." I lost it—just started bawling. I don't think I have ever cried over an election before, and I'm really not a weepy-waily sort, but that got through all my defenses.
I flashed back to learning that song in school at a very tender age—was it kindergarten or first grade? Early, anyway. Learned by rote, of course, so the words didn't always make sense—kind of like the Pledge of Allegiance. My ear heard the first bit as "My Country, Tisafee." And I remember singing it and thinking, "Tisafee? I thought I lived in America."
And that's what I've been thinking all day. I thought I lived in America.
You know the place? Sweet land of liberty? Where my fathers died? The Bush Administration says they love America and they love liberty—but I ask you, what is it they love about America if not the Bill of Rights and the Constitution? Because they sure seem determined to trample those into the ground. True liberty is not about forcing everyone to think as you do, do as you do, about trying to tell others what to believe and feel, what to do with their own bodies in the privacy of their own homes. True liberty is not about licentiousness, either. It's about being allowed to make up your own mind about things and to act on your decisions—an' it harm none.
I do love my country. It is the land where my fathers died—all the way back to the Revolution and beyond. My mothers were living and dying here, too. I've got a long-lived stake in how things go here. I think it's worth fighting for. But it looks like this fight for the soul of our nation is going to be a long, hard struggle. And it looks like one side is paying a lot of lip service to liberty while practicing repression.
Tuesday enough people voted their fears to make the rest of us good and scared. But good and angry, too.
I live in America. Until they haul me off to the Re-education Camps I'll keep fighting to preserve the liberty that I grew up singing about. It is sweet—and like all sweet things, once you've tasted it, you only want more.