Happy Birthday, United States of America

Happy Birthday, United States of America. Happy 242nd Birthday to you.

You were born in strife, rebellion and uncertainty; in a duality of freedom and slavery; declaring rights to free speech, free association, freedom to worship (or not); freedom to assemble, with rights to a free, fair trial and to belong to an armed militia yet still in a dichotomy that allowed, without using the word in your foundational document, the importation of slaves for 20 years from the moment your charter, the U.S. Constitution, became ratified.

You have survived the Alien & Sedition Acts, the Know Nothings of mid-19th Century, slavery, slavery and slavery. You have survived the Klan, the Palmer Raids, the McCarthy and HUAC hearings and the Red Scare, Dixie and Dixiecrats, segregation, assassination of four presidents, of a would be and would have been president and of a prophet of Civil Rights.

You have survived all of that and worse yet. You will survive the present and come out all the stronger.

You have survived economic despair and collapse in 1837, 1873, 1907, 1929, especially 1929, 1973, and, lately and gravely, 2008; and yet you emerge from those trials the greatest, largest, most superior global economic power in the entire economic history of the world.

You teeter now on surrendering that, on rending new, great supports like the TPP, constructed to keep you in that position through one more century. Whether you do or do not is up to you as a people; up to the decisions your people will make this year and in the years to come when they go to vote — if they go to vote as they are called upon to do.

There may or may not be a god, but there is nothing more godly than the exercise of free expression in the booths where your people vote. Upon such decisions the fate of the globe, the earth itself may depend as, inexorably victim to human conduct, it warms.

You have been enabled by George Washington and his steadfast commitment to a decent administration, civility in government, dogged duty to the nation; by the genius of Alexander Hamilton, who created the system of capital that has carried you to the greatest financial power and heights of any nation in history; of the sweeping continental vision of Thomas Jefferson held within his narrow understanding of human nature, and by James Madison’s ability to express the language of rights even while he, like Washington and Jefferson, engaged in that peculiar institution that denied those rights to so many among their fellow beings.

Above all you have been enabled and ennobled by the genius of  perhaps the greatest man who ever graced humanity, Abraham Lincoln; A man some think the greatest writer of the English language but for Shakespeare and notwithstanding Churchill; by “Father Abraham” as the slaves he freed called him, a man who was and is the most elevated expression ever of the better angels of our American nature.

America, you graced by the leadership and passion of TR, who treasured and preserved your heritage of land, landscapes, “purple mountains majesty” and nature’s design in the great parks and land and sea conservatoires he began — that continue, even if  disturbed now by lesser creatures serving a wayward government in a wayward time.

Time heals and will heal the sores, scars and wounds carved by lesser men into the legacy of nature’s design left by TR and expanded by so many of his successors.

You, America, have been granted and had thrust upon you world leadership designed by that most cunning, convincing genius of good, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR, a man of such mystery and mysterious wisdom that no one then who knew him, knew him, a man of whom we can only guess at now because of his odd but ever determined ways. But he told us “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and that is so today as much as t’was on March 4, 1933.

He saved us from the worst of times, led us through the worst conflict in human history and, before he left the world’s and history’s stage, designed a post-war world in the images of democracy, freedom and free commerce. It has stood the tests of time, the winds of despair and tides of fortune more than 70 years and is sturdy enough, on the foundation of America, to reassert itself in the years to come.

You America are sung in song from “sea to shining sea”, in the houses we live in; in the epic language of “Ballad for Americans”, in the American Songbook written by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin and a whole lot of other Jews and, oh yes, lest we forget, by Johnny Mercer and, and of course Cole Porter — he who was so gay but never had the right to be Gay;  Oh, and by Glen Miller (can we be, are we ever in the mood for a wedding without “In the Mood”?).

And all those songs from “somewhere over the rainbow” (per example, Yip Harburg, who wrote also, “Buddy Can You Spare a Dime” and “Finian’s Rainbow”), that, oh no, can’t be taken away from you, because “a nightingale sang in Barkley Square”  “in the cool, cool of the evening,” “so tell ’em I’ll be there”, oh and by the way, yes we should add America, “P.S., I love you.”

We sing of you America from the marches of John Philip Souza to that famous alert from George M. Cohan that “The Yanks are Coming, They’re Come, Come Coming Over There” and for the better part of a century American armed forces have gone where they have had to — over there, wherever “over there” has been with the echo of this advice from every G.I. in the second big war to his girlfriend and perhaps now too with her or his boyfriend,  “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me…til I come marching home”.

You have America, freed yourself mostly from the chains of slavery, of segregation but not taken your neck from the chopping block of race hatred and fear, though you have let homosexual Americans be who they are and marry if they choose.

You have had grave faults and committed miscarriages of justice through your history as you are doing today. Today on your southern border and in the terrible cells where you hold small children, a stain of sin that will not wash away. You are marred each time  men with guns and badges dressed  in blue, who should know better, who are paid to know better, kill people in minority communities across your nation because they fear the color of their skin. This must end, must pass. In time it will. Law enforcement lynchings are no better than mob lynchings. They are the same. They too must end, will end.

Still America, you survive, come through, reach one birthday and then another and keep lit a beacon that summons the world and the world comes and, even though, now and then, you draw a bad breath and try to expel those who come, ultimately they all do. They come for freedom, all kinds of freedom.

From the English in the 17th Century to the Scots Irish in the 18th Century, to the Scandinavians, Irish and Germans in mid-19th Century, to the Jews, Italians and Eastern Europeans in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries; to the few Asians who managed to come despite grave bigoted immigration laws aimed at them for 85 years; to the refugees from Europe’s greatest upheaval in the 1930s and 1940s, to the waves of immigrants from Asia and Latin America in the second half of the 20th Century they came.:

Especially they’ve come since  LBJ, that other vital man provided with great vision of social and economic justice, flawed though he was, signed legislation in 1965 to open the way for them — even as he vastly expanded your social horizon America; your social horizon and understanding of mutual civic and public responsibility for one another as he built a second and third story on the foundation of social security laid by FDR.

Some, many of us, today cry out in despair, in anger, in total frustration and horror at what has become of you America.  But we know, in our hearts and minds, Dear America, that you always take a step back before taking two steps forward.

So we know that from this awful and giant step back we are and have been taking, you will summon the energy, the design, the brilliance and the fortitude of those who have served you most and best these 242 years; we know America, from this time that “tries mens souls” you will emerge ready to proceed and lead history.

Because America, if you don’t who will? And you will. So Happy Birthday my country; and let your first proclamation not be forgotten:

Declared in and by the Continental Congress, July 4, 1776:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Those three compelling qualities are yet so necessary to build and maintain a free and abundant society.

So Happy Birthday America once more in your never-ending quest for “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The search goes on, the object is estimable and your nation will find its way again.