Nobody could stand forth now in America and say “I am guiltless. I had no part in this. I did not help bring America down from her bright pinnacle.” For that would be to deny that one had lived through those years, and only little children could say that.
Alan Drury: Advise And Consent
The sunsets on this lake are spectacular, very nearly explosive in a pyrotechnic sense.
And on this 4th of July, I will sit quietly and watch the sun set on Otty Lake.
Tucked away just outside the town of Perth.
In Ontario, Canada.
It is as close as I intend to come to watching something akin to pyrotechnics.
This year I will not celebrate America’s Independence Day.
And never mind that this is America’s very special 250th Independence Day.
I will not celebrate simply because this moment in America’s history, in its destiny, does not feel like an occasion for celebration.
It feels like something of a death watch.
I say this reluctantly. As a native son who was born and raised American.
Who grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. When we learned Americanism vs. Communism after our ABCs.
Who enlisted right out of high school, at the height of the Vietnam war, to serve my country.
Who went to the Gulf of Tonkin and did my duty. Because that was where my military service took me.
Who mustered out of the military and spent the rest of my adult life doing my civic duty as best I understood it.
Which is to say that I voted.
I paid my taxes.
I obeyed the law.
And, as a journalist, I always participated in what Meg Greenfield, the late editorial page editor of the Washington Post, called the “daily argument of public life.”
Because that was what I understood to be my obligation as an American. As a native son.
And so here I am. On Canadian soil. On this ostensibly very special American Independence Day.
I am here as a matter of choice.
And to be clear:
It isn’t my loathing of Donald Trump that brought me to a country not my own on this ostensibly very special Independence Day.
Trump is not the problem.
He is a symptom.
And I do not blame him for a damned thing.
The fault, dear America, is not in the stars.
It is in us.
There is a rot in the body politic.
A rot born of mutual loathing.
Of a rank national cynicism.
Or perhaps, simply, of some warped American ethos that tells us if all the world is indeed a stage…
…then we must be sufficiently entertained at all times. Or what the hell is the point?
The Americans who voted for Trump, knowing full well exactly who and what he is, consigned us to this twilight of The American Dream.
Whether they voted out of ignorance, avarice, resentment or a warped sense of patriotism that is indeed the last refuge of scoundrels.
The people who did not bother to vote did not give a fig about the life or death of American democracy.
Because, oh I dunno, perhaps because they were not sufficiently entertained.
And so, on this very special 250th anniversary of Independence Day, I am a voluntary, if temporary, expat.
I will watch no pyrotechnics. I will vow no allegiance. I will sing no anthem.
But I will hang on in quiet desperation. I will lament for what America once was but is no longer.
I hope, for my childrens’ sake, that this ship may yet be righted.
That America may yet be somehow redeemed.
That we may yet come to our collective senses.
But I do not expected it to happen this coming midterms.
It may not even happen in my lifetime.
And so this native son will sit out this ostensibly very special Independence Day.
In a country not my own.
Grieving for a country that is no longer my own.
And for America it was a time of nip and tuck, and a darkening passageway with only God’s good grace – if he cared to confer it again upon a people who sometimes didn’t seem to deserve it any more – to see the country safely through.
Alan Drury: Advise And Consent
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