Shall It Be Sustained?

As a July 4th tradition, I’ve posted an excerpt from Stephen Vincent Benet’s poem Listen to the People.  The title I originally used for these posts was It Shall Be Sustained, which is from the last line of Benet’s poem.

Narrator:

This is Independence Day,
Fourth of July, the day we mean to keep,
Whatever happens and whatever falls
Out of a sky grown strange;
This is firecracker day for sunburnt kids,
The day of the parade,
Slambanging down the street.
Listen to the parade!
There’s J. K. Burney’s float,
Red-white-and-blue crepe-paper on the wheels,
The Fire Department and the local Grange,
There are the pretty girls with their hair curled
Who represent the Thirteen Colonies,
The Spirit of East Greenwich, Betsy Ross,
Democracy, or just some pretty girls.
There are the veterans and the Legion Post
(Their feet are going to hurt when they get home),
The band, the flag, the band, the usual crowd,
Good-humored, watching, hot,
Silent a second as the flag goes by,
Kidding the local cop and eating popsicles,
Jack Brown and Rosie Shapiro and Dan Shay,
Paul Bunchick and the Greek who runs the Greek’s,
The black-eyed children out of Sicily,
The girls who giggle and the boys who push,
All of them there and all of them a nation.
And, afterwards,
There’ll be ice-cream and fireworks and a speech
By somebody the Honorable Who,
The lovers will pair off in the kind dark
And Tessie Jones, our honor-graduate,
Will read the declaration.
That’s how it is. It’s always been that way.
That’s our Fourth of July, through war and peace,
That’s our fourth of July.

And a lean farmer on a stony farm
Came home from mowing, buttoned up his shirt
And walked ten miles to town.
Musket in hand.
He didn’t know the sky was falling down
And, it may be, he didn’t know so much.
But people oughtn’t to be pushed around
By kings or any such.
A workman in the city dropped his tools.
An ordinary, small-town kind of man
Found himself standing in the April sun,
One of a ragged line
Against the skilled professionals of war,
The matchless infantry who could not fail,
Not for the profit, not to conquer worlds,
Not for the pomp or the heroic tale
But first, and principally, since he was sore.
They could do things in quite a lot of places.
They shouldn’t do them here, in Lexington.

He looked around and saw his neighbors’ faces…

The poem is very long, and is worth reading in full. The full text was published in Life Magazine; it is online here.

Benet’s poem ends with these words:

We made it and we make it and it’s ours
We shall maintain it. It shall be sustained

But shall it?

 

The probability that the American experiment will survive has seemed, over recent years, to have been on the decline.  In my 2022 version of this post, I mentioned several disturbing news stories:

In Arizona, “F*** the Fourth” was the official July 4 message from the Pima County Democratic Party.

In California, a school board member called for July 4th boycott.

The city of Orlando, Florida apologized for a fireworks promo it had sent out, saying that people probably don’t want to celebrate because America is full of hate and adding “we can’t blame them.”

And, after 30 years. NPR…a network that does receive some level of taxpayer funding…cancelled its annual Declaration of Independence reading.

I could add dozens of similar examples.  Particularly appalling was Biden’s denunciation of the country that he leads in his address to graduates of Howard University, making the false assertion that these (black) graduates would have to be 10 times better to get equal consideration.  Tribalism, undercutting national identity, has been on the march, and this has been very largely driven by the Democratic Party and by the educational institutions that are such an important part of its coalition.

Also particularly appalling, especially in the light of Benet’s poem, is the evident contempt that so many people in positions of influence and power feel toward the majority of citizens of this country–in particular, those without college degrees, those who work with their hands, those who are rural and/or southern, those who are believing Christians.  See my post The Phobia(s) That May Destroy America, also Living in the Hate of the Common People  and Living in the Hate of the Common People, continued.  These attitudes are to opposite of the attitude toward The People expressed in Biden’s poem, and, to be fair, the opposite of at least the stated attitudes of the traditional Left.  The Biden administration, and Democrats generally, are happy to tax non-college people to pay off the loans of college graduates who are better off financially than those being taxed on their behalf.  This is ‘privilege’ of the kind that existed in the French nobility prior to the Revolution.

Yet the same people who express contempt for The People are very often the same ones who today wrap themselves in the Spirit of 1776 and claim to be defenders of Democracy.

I keep thinking of the words of the British general Edward Spears, describing his feelings in the aftermath of Munich:

Like most people, I have had my private sorrows, but there is no loss that can compare with the agony of losing one’s country, and that is what some of us felt when England accepted Munich.   All we believed in seemed to have lost substance.

The life of each of us has roots without which it must wither; these derive sustenance from the soil of our native land, its thoughts, its way of life, its magnificent history; the lineage of the British race is our inspiration.  The past tells us what the future should be. Â When we threw the Czechs to the Nazi wolves, it seemed to me as if the beacon lit centuries ago, and ever since lighting our way, had suddenly gone out, and I could not see ahead.

Yet it was only two years after Munich that Britain demonstrated its magnificent resistance to Nazi conquest. Perhaps the United States of America will similarly rediscover its spirit.

There are indeed some hopeful signs. Numerous individuals have shown courage in standing up against the Cancellers. Parents in many states are now asking pointed questions about what has really been going on in their schools. The consequences of extreme Left prosecutors and ‘defund the police’ are making themselves clear.

In my 2022 version of this post, I mentioned this Harvard student who dared to criticize pervasive anti-Americanism in her senior speech.  This took some courage. There have been many other examples of personal courage.  Like former Levi’s executive Jennfer Sey, who walked away from a strong shot at being the next CEO of the company in order to be able to continue expressing her concerns about the effect of Covid lockdowns on kids–and the costs she faced weren’t only matters of career and of finances:

I was called every name you can imagine — murderer, racist, eugenicist — for advocating for open public schools. I lost my city. My friends. My community.

But she kept her integrity, and has forged new friendships and is building a new business.

Many more:  Andy Ngo, who has taken considerable physical risks to report on ‘Antifa’ and similar groups.  Dr Judith Curry, who left academia in order to be able to pursue scientific truth on climate without overwhelming political pressure.  The basketball player Enes Freedom Kantor.  JK Rowling.  Abigail Shrier, who has dared to write about the role of social pressure in teenage transgender behavior.  Heather MacDonald. Numerous black conservatives and other blacks who have let themselves in for incredible racial abuse by departing from their expected support for the Democrats and their agenda.

May not be as dramatic as standing against the Redcoats with a musket, but this kind of courage is critically important at the present time.

One extremely positive event has been the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk, who has not only eliminated the heavy-handed censorship but also allowed publication of the dismal details of what was going on there before.

On the very negative side is the outbreak of almost incomprehensible levels of anti-Semitism–and support for the Hamas barbarians–on America’s college campuses.  Note that this is almost entirely a phenomenon of the universities–especially the ‘elite’ universities–and certain large cities.  It’s not those rural people and Christians who have been perpetrating this atrociousness: it’s those who consider themselves to be educated and enlightened.  And here also, there is pushback from courageous individuals, such as professor Shai Davidai of Columbia.

These anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and pro-barbarism events have caused many individuals–some of them quite wealthy–to break with the Democrats…and with the Ivy League academic establishment.

I can’t change the title on these 4th of July posts back to It Shall Be Sustained yet…but i believe that there is a reasonable chance for the future.

The 2022 version of this post is here, along with the comments.  Apologies for the weird typography, it is something caused by WordPress changes.