America Belongs to Those Who Believe

My son wants fireworks, and he has not been shy about expressing this desire as the Fourth of July approaches.

Can we go get some fireworks, Dad?

When are we going to get fireworks?

Look, Dad, there’s a fireworks store, pull over!

This is natural and understandable, of course; a ten-year-old boy’s brain is hard-wired to want to blow things up. Don’t ask me to explain the neuroscience behind it; all I know is, I was once a ten-year-old boy myself, and some of my fondest childhood memories center on illegal-in-Ohio fireworks that a friend of my dad brought in from out of state. (There’s few things more exciting than a mildly-illicit product brought in from another state; it’s one of the small joys of our federal system.) As an adult, though, I’m less enthusiastic about the procurement of pyrotechnics, for a handful of reasons. There’s the safety angle, of course—my son was born a few minutes after midnight on the 5th of July, and I recall watching amateur-but-impressive fireworks lighting up the sky from our hospital room window as my wife labored with him. “We’re gonna be the only people in this hospital on purpose tomorrow,” I remarked, only half-joking. Cost is a bigger concern, though. I was stunned the first time I went into one of those roadside warehouses myself and perused the assortments named things like Shock and Awe and Aerial Assault and Eagle Annihilator, some of which cost more than my first car did. As a Dad (literal), I’m concerned for my children’s safety, but as a Dad (spiritual), I also spend each 4th of July running a mental tally of how much my neighbors must’ve spent on those mortars.

These are both factors in limiting my desire for fireworks. More than anything, though… it’s just awfully hard to feel like celebrating right now.

I love this country. I feel like I need to get that out of the way up front, lest I be misunderstood, but it’s true. I love this country, I’m not afraid to say it, and I’ve never shied away from representing myself as American. I studied abroad in Europe in the months right after the Iraq War started, and some of my classmates, wary of unpopularity in a foreign country, sewed Canadian flag patches onto their backpacks. I have nothing but fondness for our neighbors to the north, but I remember being disgusted by this at the time. I am an American, through and through, and I’d rather endure a few lectures from German hostel-mates than lie about it.

That said, things are especially grim right now, and there’s no hiding that.

Every day, some troubling new development crosses our social media feeds: vital government agencies shut down, dedicated civil servants thrown out of work, long-held rights capriciously redrawn by an extremist Supreme Court. The people in charge right now are hell-bent on inflicting harm, and they’re hardly bothering to conceal it in the guise of legitimate politics anymore. I know that not everyone shares my beliefs on the role of government in our lives, and I’m fine with that. I’m perfectly capable of having a civil discussion with people who don’t share my specific political alignment, and I see that diversity of opinion in my neighborhood, in my workplace, in my place of worship. We can agree to disagree on matters of taxation, regulation, trade policy, whatever.

There’s no nuance to debate about this, though: either you’re for masked men snatching people off the streets, or you’re not.

This country has always been defined by two things: a noble set of founding principles, and never quite living up to them. We were a nation conceived in liberty, but one that got awfully shifty when asked to define who “all men” included when considering equals. For most (if not all) of the nearly quarter-millennium we’ve existed, this country hasn’t been anything resembling truly free unless you look a lot like me—a white, straight, cisgender, Christian male without disabilities.

Still, the promise of America mattered.

It resonated both near and far, echoing far past our borders, across oceans and to people all over the world. America might never have been perfect, but it’s been a place that you could believe in—a place where you could live free of danger, free of persecution, free of fear. Free to pursue a better life for your family, and to raise generations of new American families to come. A place you want to be a part of.

I hear the chatter. It’s an evolution of the Canadian-flag-patch thinking. People in a similar socioeconomic position as me—that is, people with the luxury of options—have begun to wonder if there’s any hope for this country. They wonder if it’s going to be a safe place to live in the future, a safe place to raise our children and their children. They’re wondering if it might just not be better to pack up and leave.

It’s an alluring thing to discuss over drinks with friends, and my Instagram algorithm (always a frightening-accurately gauge of my personal zeitgeist) isn’t showing me ads for companies promising EU passports by accident. In the recent past, I’ve brushed off any notion of leaving the country with the wry defense that “all my stuff is here”, but I get why these discussions are happening now, especially if you didn’t hit the demographic lottery like I did.

I’m still not willing to engage in it, though.

I’m not ready to give up on the idea of America, even if it seems to be ebbing away from us like the shoreline before a tsunami. This is my country, damnit; it’s the only home I’ve ever known, and as much as I might love vacationing abroad, I’m not running away from my home.

To borrow from Michael Bolton, the unfortunately-coincidentally-named software engineer in Office Space (1998)— “why should I change? He’s the one who sucks!”

These people, the gleeful goons, the giddy race scientists, the cheerleaders of misery, the “America for Americans only” demagogues—they don’t believe in this country.

They never have, no matter how brazenly they’ll wrap themselves in the flag to justify their actions. The country they believe is small and cruel. It’s a country where secret police demand to see papers, where neighbors turn on neighbors, where the state is the enemy of the people rather than the embodiment of their collective will. It’s a place governed by fear and by hate, but even more so by doubt—doubt that any country could possibly be big enough to contain multitudes. Doubt that any country could be strong enough to take the unrealized dreams of the rest of the world and make them possible. Doubt that any country could be resilient enough to face hardship head-on and keep marching toward those ideals put to parchment by imperfect men two and a half centuries ago.

They don’t believe in America, and no matter how tightly they grip the reins of government right now, America doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the people who do believe in it, whether they came over on the Mayflower or through Ellis Island, in business class or on foot, “the right way” or not. Heck, maybe they were here long before anyone who looked like me showed up. It belongs to people who believe in those ideals that we’ve strove towards but never quite lived up to, people who believe that we should keep striving anyways because that arc of the universe isn’t going to bend itself. It belongs to people willing to do the work, willing to stand up for their communities, and willing to take to their streets to stand up for those unmet ideals. It belongs to people who can still see the promise of this place in their mind and want more than anything to be a part of it, even if they have to cross an ocean or a desert to do so.

I’ve never thought “The Star-Spangled Banner” was an especially great song; count me in the camp of people who’d prefer “America the Beautiful” as our national anthem. The former can be a stirring song in the right hands, and it’s occasionally darkly delightful to see an AutoTune-dependent studio star stumble over its more difficult parts on national television, but the latter’s a prettier, easier song, with more positive imagery: amber waves of grain, purple mountains majesty, things of that nature.

There’s something to be said for the official song in our current situation, though.

The anthem, as you surely learned in grade-school social studies, describes the siege of Fort McHenry by the British during the War of 1812, and composer Francis Scott Key’s pride in seeing the Stars and Stripes still flying at the end of the bombardment. It’s easy to lose sight of this, given how often the song is punctuated by a fighter-jet flyover these days, but those rockets (red glare) and bombs (bursting in air)—those weren’t our military might on display. They were a serious threat to the persistence of the nation, launched when it was younger than I am now.

We survived that night despite the bombs bursting in air, not because we had them.

I’ll probably suck it up and buy a small assortment of fireworks. As rightly-down as I might feel about our country right now, I can recognize when I’m being a wet blanket, and my kids have already heard enough civics lectures from me lately. (Pity my poor daughter, who asked “what’s Labor Day celebrate?” the other day.) The boy wants fireworks, and it’s his birthday weekend. We’ll surely be outgunned in all directions, but I know the thrill in being told “okay, buddy, you can light this one yourself if you’re really careful” more than outweighs the size of the explosion.

I know that many of you reading this share my complicated feelings on the state of our nation right now, and I wish I could tell you that everything’s going to be okay. I wish I could tell myself that, but I’m simply not sure. This night is far from over.

Still, if you find yourself at a fireworks show this weekend—whether it’s a big civic one or an unofficial neighborhood gathering like mine—I want you to look around at the faces lit by those bursts. There might be some unironically-jingoistic shirts, some ugly red hats and some false-idol-worshipping flags, but that won’t be all there is. There will be faces that don’t look like some small-minded men’s vision of what a country should be. There will be Americans both old and young, from Sons and Daughters of the Revolution to first-generation citizens and people still chasing that dream.

There will be people that still believe that this country can live up to its promise.

Our flag is still there, too.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

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