Yesterday was Memorial Day, a day to honor heroes of the past. Many of the houses in our village were draped with U.S. flags and red, white and blue bunting, which makes for a nice display as you walk down the main street. It made me sorry that I had procrastinated on getting a U.S. flag for our porch so we could join in the celebration.
The heroes that I honor are not necessarily the same as those that inspire my neighbors, however. Now, perhaps more than any other time in our nation's life, I believe it is important for us to honor our contrarians, our scolds, those cantankerous loudmouths that warn us, like a canary in a coal mine, that we have made a wrong turn. We need to celebrate those obnoxious, unpopular prophets of true morality who are not afraid to tell us when our national acts are out of sync with our national ideals. We need to remind ourselves that it is the tellers of "inconvenient truths", to quote Vice-President Gore, that have repeatedly saved our nation's soul when it has gone astray.
As one shining example, the 1961 Freedom Riders were among the bravest warriors for justice that our country has ever produced. Consider the incredible courage it must have taken to get on that Greyhound bus headed through an angry savage South where the visitors could expect nothing but brutal repression. There was no law in Montgomery the day those brave young people arrived at the bus station on Court Street. My city, along with Southern society in general during that dark time, had ceded its moral authority to its dregs, its refuse, its "White Citizens Councils". The mob that met the bus on that Saturday morning, which included several off-duty city policemen and state troopers, had a stated purpose to commit premeditated assault, to carry out terrorist acts. All of our state's law enforcement officers, up to and including Governor John Patterson, knew well in advance what was about to happen, but did nothing to stop it. The students themselves knew with stark certainty what awaited them. It had to require at least as much selfless devotion to a cause and just as much bravery to take that bus trip as it does for a soldier to march into battle. I honor them both, the soldier and the Freedom Rider.
The Bush Administration does everything in its power to stifle dissent. U.S. citizens who criticize the Iraq invasion give "aid and comfort to the enemy", despite the fact that most of us really don't know who "the enemy" is. We are told that "If you are not with us, you are against us." The clear message is that disagreement with the Administration is tantamount to treason.
There is nothing particularly new in this. Every president in our history has tried to silence his critics in one way or another. There is something sinister about how these guys work at it, though, with their tame in-house TV network also known as as Fox News, and their secret torture chambers at places like Guantanamo. There is little doubt that for this administration, The U.S. Constitution is at best an inconvenience, and they are not going to be slowed down by any of its provisions unless there is a real possibility that they will be caught red-handed.
All the more reason to honor and encourage our dissenters this Memorial Day. We must send out the message that true patriotism demands that you criticize your country when it is wrong. There is no question that we are in the Iraq disaster today because George Bush and his cohorts lied to us; but that alone would not have done the trick. They got away with their lies because the press, the Democratic opposition and rational people throughout the country were intimidated into silence by the xenophobia masquerading as patriotic fervor that poisoned our society after the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Plenty of people outside of the Administration knew in 2003 that the Bush justification for going to war was based on nonexistent or woefully weak evidence, but they couldn't muster the courage to say so out loud. They were afraid to speak the truth for fear of being labeled "disloyal" or "unpatriotic".
Where in God's name were all the Clinton Administration alumni? They had been privy to all the same intelligence that the Bushies were twisting to make a case for war. Why didn't some of them at least say "Hey, guys, I'm not sure I read it that way. Why don't you take another look?"? It might have at least slowed him down. Some of the guilt must be shared as well by the career personnel in the State Department and the Pentagon. They knew, or should have known, that the emperor had no clothes, and a couple of very public resignations might have derailed the Bush War Express. It never happened.
Iraq is a national tragedy that will plague us for decades. It has cost us thousands of lives, untold billions of dollars, and it has destroyed the moral authority that the United States used to exercise in the world. We are entangled in the Iraq civil war, at least in part, because in 2002 and 2003, there was nobody out there with the raw guts those college kids had when they got on the bus to Montgomery in 1961. We need their type of patriotism so badly today.
Thomas R. Borden Waugh, Alabama May 29, 2007