“But there is a reason why this country has checks and balances. And there is a reason why people can’t arbitrarily vote on the rights of others without having to defend this vote in the logical arena of courts…” ~ Alvin McEwen
Yesterday was a good day for a lot of people I care about and for the country I loved as a girl and desperately keep trying to love as an adult. The US is a difficult parent to keep faith in as I grow older. I imagine that most people who identify with patriotism the way I do feel disillusionment and frustration when they see injustice bullied into law. The patriotism I grew up understanding as child is not the rabid hate-fueled variety that infects newscasts today and centers itself on denying rights and aligning the government toward a church state. The patriotism I grew up with was corny and riddled with inaccuracy, but at its core was the belief that equality and justice will always win given a fair hearing. Perhaps clumsily, perhaps at the end of an ugly, frightening path. I maintain an exhausted hope that this holds true, that wrongs will right and that truth can always stand tall, even in the face of ten thousand screaming lies. It is a tired, relentless brand of patriotism that believes every voice must be listened to on equal ground in the public arena and then the arguements must be laid out and decided on merit and merit alone.
Scratch any cynic and you draw idealist blood.
As a girl I believed everything was possible — that all things could be repaired through the system. These days I see how the system is used against its citizens and itself and I wish I held the answers to fixing the problems, rerouting the redundancies, repairing the loopholes. Don’t get me wrong. If I were Queen for the day, I know what I would change in a snap. However, it’s not about my way, or anyone’s way. The promise of America is fairness in the end, not perfection of the moment. We fail and we fail a lot and we will continue to fail. The promise is the path — to aim for right, even when the trajectory has been crooked for a long, long time. You can’t buy back the past and you can’t pretend injustice didn’t happen, but you set out to see it doesn’t happen again. This we can do. This we must do.
When a bunch of old, flawed white men sat in a very hot room and yelled at one another until they had worked out a compromise on the means to govern themselves, the miracle of the act was not in trust, but in openly admitted suspicion. Of each other. Of any government. Of too much power being put into the hands of anyone or any group. In many ways the words “In God We Trust” should be followed by “Everyone Else is Suspect” to drive home the purpose of their sentiment. I am a firm believer in protecting me just as vigilantly from other Americans as I am from outside foes.
Because of my inherent and fundamentally American mistrust of my fellows, I had a sort of sick feeling in the middle of October that Proposition 8 would pass in California. I hoped against it — in part because of the people I care about who would be affected both directly and indirectly. I also hoped against it as an American who was once a little girl and an idealistic patriot. I hoped against it because there is a deep shame in the denial of human rights toward any individual for any reason and it’s a shame America has already been on the wrong side of. Repeatedly.
I still identify enough as an American to feel personally offended on some small level when injustice is put into law in my name. Because “we the people” includes me. I believed that as a child; I believe it now. So when someone is denied their rights, when someone is imposed upon, when someone is tortured in the name of my country, it offends me as much as it saddens me when someone dies in the name and protection of my rights and my country. Anyone who doesn’t see the links between those emotions doesn’t get the full scope of the social contract of advanced citizenship. You can’t have one and not the other. You can’t mouth about defending the US and protecting its citizens and then preach denial of rights or justification for committing atrocities out the other. Not while maintaining any semblance of intellectual honesty.
Near the end of October I sent the lyrics to a song I called “The Way You Fly” to Grace. She developed them into a song we now call simply “Fly.” I didn’t tell her what the song was about or what it meant to me; I never do. She worked her magic and somehow it just expressed, through her music and vocals, everything that was churning inside me when writing the lyrics. I felt a connection to it the first time she played it and I still feel tethered at the heart every time she plays it. It speaks to me in patience and anger and hope. I’m not sure how it speaks to Grace or anyone else, but that’s the compromise of handing off your work for public consumption — everyone gets their own piece of it in one way or another.
On its basic level the words are a simple promise from one patient lover to a passionate, frightened partner. A statement of endurance and commitment, despite injustice. I was writing on that level when I first tapped out the start of the lyrics. It was personal. I’ve never been told in my life whom I might be allowed to love. The idea that someone — anyone — would dare tell someone else who they are allowed to love, marry, spend a lifetime with — it offends me down to the bottom of my little girl idealist American soul. How could it not?
As I’ve returned to the words, I’ve found what they mean to me doesn’t stop on that personal level, however; they are not merely a conversation between two people anymore in my perception. Rather, the expression has turned into a promise from the soul of truth to the soul of love denied. A promise that temporary concepts cannot change eternal outcomes. Without intending it at all, I wrote something that actually reflects what the promise of America means to me.
Love and truth will win. In the end they have to, because they are the only things we touch in the meat of our animal brains that really matter. Strip away the labels and the distractions and the fear and you have only the unflinching truth — sometimes patient, sometimes cruel, sometimes comforting, sometimes tormenting. Truth is undeniable and it will only be delayed for so long. But we also know that truth without love is joyless. They need each other. We, as a race of strange monkeys, often forget that in the middle of all the things we create to distract our minds from fears over our own mortality. Passion without purpose or love, even in the name of truth, is missing a fundamental half of the human equation just as much as mindless emotion without truth to guide it can lead to dangerous waters.
In the balance, where love and truth align, we win. And that is why yesterday was a good day.
And every time we think we’re falling, we must remember how to fly.
Scratch any cynic…
