I Used to Sleep at the Foot of Old Glory

:BR: I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory, :BR:
And awake in the dawn's early light.
But much to my surprise,
When I opened my eyes,
I was the victim of the Great Compromise
- John Prine

* * *

As a boy, I used to salute the American flag when the broadcast channels signed off the air, after a day of playing softball and catching frogs, drinking lemonade and capturing the flag. I watched Kennedy lead the country toward the Moon and stars, and was a guest as a child at the White House when The Black Watch came to play there. I heard Martin Luther King's speech on TV, and cried even if I understood little. I worked in one of the first fully integrated firms in DC, with black people also in management positions. I escorted visiting Americans around the Mall as part of my job during the 1976 Bicentennial, and saw how all cheered when I faced down a group of American Nazis who wished to board my tour bus. No one could have been prouder of the fine traditions my country represented, and the ideals we were coming not only to embrace, but live out in daily practice. It was an age of heroes, of sweeping historical events, of belief in our better selves.

Not that there was no darkness. A victim of neglect and abuse throughout my childhood and adolescence, I left the country to get healthy and start anew, a one-man Peace Corps ready to work for comity among nations and peoples. Mankind were my brothers and sisters, democracy the house of our shared future, and the oath of "Never Again" resounded as a secular yet sacred commitment in my heart that surely all people of good faith shared. Then I met the world.

My degrees were worthless in a foreign land. Illegal work without access to social services was the norm for many years, under special regimes that were set up to make such quasi-legal existences possible. Eventually I did marry and settle down. Yet so palpable was the anti-American sentiment where I was, my young son would attack me for speaking English in public if I did so, so great was his fear of that rejection.

I've had slogans painted on the walls of places I worked associating me with the lizard invaders of 1980s TV shows, my car vandalized repeatedly if left on the street, people standing up and leaving a table when realizing my provenance, my wife spat upon and called a traitor for marrying me. This did not dissuade me from providing a defense for the Anglo-Saxon world I was associated with in blanket fashion, asked daily to answer for any of its real or perceived ills. I never went local, in the sense of capitulating to the extremes of left or right, who are always ready for a traitor as reaffirmation of dogma. That easy way lie the sirens who promise acceptance, for a price.

I explained Vietnam as both right (anti-Soviet expansion) and wrong (frustration of legitimate self-determination), and so tragic for all. I explained why Carter could not invade Iran to some, and explained why Carter should not give in to terrorists to others. I fought the Falklands war by attending to the people who would walk into my office off the street, unannounced, and start an argument, while I stood patiently with history books, law, and maps in hand. Reagan, well, Reagan started making things more difficult, but I kept it up. And so on, and so forth, and on into the night, always alone and on my own, not as a member of any force, group, or informal gathering.

I thought of myself as a Warm Warrior in a cold world.

* * *

Fast forward to today. The Anglo world has turned its back on all of the principles and values I thought it represented. Of course, no one is perfect, but I thought the David Dukes and Nigel Farages of the world were properly isolated by a polite society that would never embrace such ideas beyond a small fringe. What a naive mistake that has suddenly been shown to be.

Now Brexit. And Trump. And that horrifying lynch mob of a 2016 Republican convention. Anglos complaining loudly about the indigenous peoples they invaded, or others they enslaved, as if perpetrators could be legitimate victims, and victims blamed for being abused. The clear fact that it is my generation, the Boomers on either side of the Atlantic, betraying every single ideal our parents, and we as youth, ever stood for, all the while throwing acid on the roots of democracy.

Which now leads me to wonder just how deeply those ideals ever ran in many hearts and minds. I feel as though I never knew anyone, that I was never privy to the private sniggering behind closed doors that whispered "go for the money, the money, the money; forget the defense of anything, and grab whatever isn't nailed down. Nice guys finish last; we keep them only for when it is time for all of those saps to come to the aid of God and country our interests."

So now? Now I see Trump and the Republicans bending over for Putin and praising falsehood, injustice, and the unAmerican way. Across the Anglo world, I see growing armies of self-serving racists or self-referential consumerists who care for nothing but gold, unfettered action as if freedom were a one-way street, and social approval.

* * *

What to do? What I will do is undertake the research into the sources and workings of moral outrage, that same emotion that drives both me now and those I most strongly oppose, be they political or religious, to examine the place in the mind that these ideas take, and how they can take hold in dangerous ways. I will endeavor to lessen and redirect the contempt I feel for the wide-spread rejection of equality, modernity, and fair play, and to post in better terms.* But I swear to God and all that might be holy (in a manner of speaking), if and when the jack boots begin to march, I will stand in their way (unarmed), even if it proves an empty gesture in vain. Better trampled in the stampede than live in the coming Brave Old World.

I am angry. It will take time to remedy, or maybe it has none. Regardless, I will continue to prepare to fight to the last word and peaceful deed, as much as I feel estranged and removed from peoples now proving a menace to peace, and increasingly foreign to me.

Well, you know, I could've beat up that feller,
But it was HER that had hopped into HIS car,
And many times I fought to protect her,
But this time she was going too far.

Now some folk had called me a coward,
Cause I left her at the drive-in that night.
But I druther have names thrown at me,
Than fight for a thang that ain't right.

(The woman in this song is, imo, the statuesque Miss Liberty.)



* I'll try not to be so harsh on nationalities. If it's any consolation, none were ever spared in my mind, as no favorites are left to me. But not fair of me to expect non-nomads to be post-national or immune to offense wrt origin. It dawns on me that I now belong to a species of rare itinerant bird that does not flock.

The purpose of this post, apart from the content, is to explain the change in avatar: the times lamentably require facing the herd. I'll try to keep that as purely metaphorical and as little personal as possible.

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/2aidzYE