On Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, I, as a peace activist, feel very out of sync. I see the flags flying on the houses and mail boxes. I hear patriotic hymns at church. I see soldiers holding the pin flags at golf tournaments. I see soldiers who are going to be deployed back to Afghanistan where some of them will died or be maimed for life being bussed to a ball game in Atlanta amid great media hype. I struggle time with this. Now, thanks to Rabbi Lerner, I know that I am not the Lone Ranger:
Faced with July 4th celebrations that are focused on militarism, ultra-nationalism, and “bombs bursting in air,” many American families who do not share those values turn July 4th into another summer holiday focused on picnics, sports, and fireworks, while doing their best to avoid the dominant rhetoric and bombast.
This year that kind of celebration is particularly difficult when many of us are deeply upset as we watch our government escalating its policy of drones, still fighting a pointless war in Afghanistan, running elections in which only the super-rich or their allies stand a chance of being taken seriously by the corporate media, watching as the distance between rich and poor becomes ever wider, while education and social programs for the poor get defunded, the Supreme Court reaffirms the right of corporations to on donate without limit to political campaigns, the environment reaches beyond the tipping point and nobody even bothers to pretend that they are going to do something to repair the ecological crisis, and the government passes legislation that in effect does away with habaeus corpus and the right of people to a trial by their peers (by legislating life imprisonment without trial for anyone the government suspects of being a foreign operative, including US citizens), and dispirited by the lack of vision of the Democratic Party, and the dis-unity and nit-picking on the Left which seems to only know what it is against but has not yet developed a coherent vision of what it is for! Oy. Continue reading
