Many voices make a country stronger

Every morning of my entire childhood I recited the Pledge of Allegiance.   I don’t think that my classmates and I really paid that much attention since we would have already spent several minutes saying our prayers in our strict Catholic school.   By the time we got around to the Pledge of Allegiance, I confess that I was probably on autopilot.  God and country can be a lot for a kid to take in at eight in the morning, especially if you’re in a cold panic over your math homework. 

When I reached high school in 1971, we were too busy looking like we weren’t trying at anything---at our homework, at our appearance and especially for our country.   It was popular not to care.  Many of my classmates had older brothers serving in the Viet Nam war and just as many who were trying to dodge the draft.  Our spoiled existence infuriated our parents, the generation that had given so much during World War Two.   If our parents were the generation that made sacrifices, then we were the generation that ruined more family dinners arguing over the war.

We stopped saying grace before meals and we stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  We questioned authority.  We pointed fingers and didn’t trust anyone over thirty.  Now many of us have children who are well over thirty.   Patriotism became a bad word and every time a young man came home with the American flag draped over his casket, the chasm widened even greater between the generations. 

Between Viet Nam and the Watergate scandal, we wore ourselves out from the discord.  Even our teachers were at odds with one another.  The young, newly minted teachers, fresh from their training and Woodstock were in a constant loggerhead with their experienced, completely exhausted and politically opposite counterparts.  No one budged and the beat went on.

The school parking lot told the story too.  Sensible looking cars were parked next to Volkswagen vans with peace signs painted all over them with “make love not war.”   I suppose I didn’t fully appreciate how interesting those times were but I owe a debt of gratitude to the two teachers whose argument carried on out beyond the tightly sealed, no-man’s-land of the teacher’s lounge.  I recognized the voices easily and was disappointed to hear that it came from my two favorite teachers; the beautiful, altruistic English teacher who had a “War is not healthy for humans and other living things” poster on her classroom wall and the voice of my other favorite who was a raging alcoholic who lived alone and had blown an inheritance on booze and women.   

As she stormed by me, I heard him yell after her, “Read, The Man Without a Country, and maybe you’ll understand.”  A week later a copy of Edward Everett Hale’s short story, “The Man Without a Country” was on our desks.  In spite of their argument, the young teacher had been moved by the story and was now sharing it with us. 

Set in 1807, it is the fictional story of a young, impressionable Army lieutenant, who falls under the wrong influences and is convicted of treason.  Upon hearing his life sentence he renounces his country and proclaims that he wishes “never to hear of the United States again!”  The judge, furious at such an outcry, grants him his wish.  For the rest of his life he lives aboard Navy warships and never touches American soil.  Not a word is ever spoken about his country and every image or word from broadsheets or newspapers is eliminated.  Bitter in his youth, his advancing years just compounds his heartbreak at losing his country.

Every few years I drag out my copy of Hale’s short story.  I marvel at how the events of the day seem to fit as if Hale had just written the story.  Consider the irony of Edward Snowden the former national security contractor accused of espionage, holed up in Russia, a country that has never valued free speech.  Now he is a man without a country.     

Like Hale’s fictional lieutenant, my advancing years have allowed me to reconsider some of my youthful positions.  These days I take nothing for granted when it comes to my beloved country.   Freedom is never easy and many voices, even in vigorous dissent, make a great country, stronger.  I only wish I had understood that when I was young.  This Fourth of July I am saying the Pledge of Allegiance and I will mean every word.