Love for Freedom or Fairness

In the afterglow of that day in May held special for mothers — those lovely humans who bring forth babies — there lives unsung the quiet epiphany new mothers experience in the love for a child. If there were a seed from which a better world might grow, it could not improve on unconditional love.

I grew up in the Flower Children Sixties where free love and a toke or two kept things cool. Love meant a lot of things, and most of them had attached strings. I’m not sure when unconditional love for one’s country was washed, pressed and stored carefully in the back closet where dad’s WWII Navy stuff was kept. The grandkids never heard anything about it.

So here we sit, in the middle of some earth shaking bad stuff that has the foundation of our democratic republic rocked — not by a shower of nukes threat, but from a thousand unconstitutional cuts by mayors in quarantine, deputies on bicycles, county officials herding crowds with drones — and we, shaming friends who choose not to conform.

This pandemic is exposing the crime of not paying attention to what’s important. It unfortunately may be a crime so egregious no consequence can effect a reasonable restitution. We are too far into grief and social disintegration. We have become — too many of us have become — members of Nero’s club, playing music to burn down all that those now long gone once held dear. When I turn on the news, I don’t hear news anymore. I hear fiddles. Angry fiddles. Giddy fiddles. Moronic fiddles. The grief comes when I look around and see who’s dancing.

America in the Twentieth Century was strong. Its strength was not its military. Nor was it the strength of an economy. Nor the wealth of its natural resources. Nor was it stunning advances in technology. The strength of America has always been an idea and a people who believe and protect it. Yearning to be free was the prose scribed at the base of our welcoming statuary in New York harbor. The idea that men and women could be free and self governing inspired people from around the world to come here.

For a long time the price of admission to the United States was learning the price of preserving freedom and agreeing to forever be obligated for its continuing purchase. Or you could be born here. For all the naturally born citizens, public education and the American ethic of self reliance insured freedom and opportunity would always prevail. Then someone invented fairness and equality, got these passed into Great Society laws and we all gave a sigh of relief and celebrated with a little fiddling and a fancy man’s dance they call having a ball.

Everybody already knew that freedom and opportunity were important, so fairness and equality took over our grammar school curriculum. Feelings were important, too. So participation awards began replacing those for first, second and third place. All were winners. All were equal. Somewhere along here the indiscretion of even mentioning inequalities became codified into political correctness. Then some curious person asked how there can be opportunity to advance if everyone and everything is equal and got called a racist.

There are a lot of dead people here in the United States. They’re buried all over the place. Lots of stories that we will never know. Lives that were hard and sometimes harrowing. Were they inspired to keep going because they loved their country and the idea it stands for, unconditionally, or does it even matter now? By politically correct standards — despite some of them still voting — they’re all fairly dead and that’s about as equal as life gets.