Happy Independence Day
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance." - Woodrow Wilson
Dachau is a quiet place, now. No birds sing there, and sometimes all you can hear is the sound of wind whispering through the dirt and rocks. Buildings stand still and empty. Sometimes, though, if you listen carefully, it seems like spirit itself is speaking softly, repeating the names and words of the millions who died there. It is a haunting place to visit. There are places there that feel almost holy, and you wonder how many prisoners prayed there, as they watched death unfold before their eyes.
I have stood on battlefields after the battle had passed, gazing at the brown splotches littering the ground. Sometimes the blood was deeper, crusting small pits and hollows where bodies had fallen. Sometime, it was sprayed out, almost awkwardly, where bodies had fallen akimbo. The fallen themselves had been removed, and Mortuary Affairs was doing the difficult and painstaking work of confirming identities and preparing the bodies for transportation and burial.*
I volunteered for the Army after a childhood as a Navy brat. I understood what a military lifestyle entailed, and, even as a teenager, I understood the cost I might pay as a soldier. There were many reasons for my final decision, but it really came down to this: I was angry. I watched the Twin Towers fall in 2001, a few days after my family and I moved to a Naval base in Japan. I officially signed up and raised my right hand in 2008, at the height of the Surge in Iraq. I was regularly seeing the dead and wounded come into Balboa Naval Hospital, often missing limbs.
To me, it was very clear: what al Qaeda did, to both Afghani citizens and to Americans, was evil. It was likewise very difficult for me to summon much sympathy for Saddam Hussein, after reading of his atrocities against Iraqis, the Kurdish minority, and the Yazidi. Years later, PTSD and a physical disability later, I have not changed my mind on that. We can of course talk about policy decisions that went awry, what should have, could have, would have, been done differently; it is also easy enough to point at the USA’s many flaws and observe that we have our own problems. Of course we do. The difference is that the people of the United States are good at, and honestly are encouraged to, hold their leadership accountable.
I think about this, deeply, but especially around Independence Day and Memorial Day. I visit POW/MIA memorial on the Army post I live on. It’s a simple plaque, erected under a grove of trees, with a bench directly opposite. I try to pour a little bit of coffee out near the memorial, and thank the dead for what they did and stood for. We are a country that simultaneously holds Langston Hughes and Jefferson Davis; the Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard and Stacey Abrams; Chief Wilma Mankiller of the Cherokee and Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys. We have parents that show up to the school PTA meeting and campaign to ban books like to Kill a Mockingbird, and parents who help organize school Pride events.
Books via Ideal Bookshelf on Facebook
I think about this, and I think about Dachau. There are those that believe that is what we are now seeing. Maybe the question here is better put: What is the treatment that prevents the rise of another Hitler, the creation of another Dachau?
Maybe the most important benchmark is this: as I mentioned, we in the United States are good at holding our government accountable. The ACLU reported that the June 14th NoKings protests drew over 5 million people. A 2020 report published by the Pew Research Center found that “Recent protest attendees are more racially and ethnically diverse, younger than Americans overall.” In other words, Americans are still active in the political process. This is encouraging. A report by the BBC found that “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.”
In the end, this is what I signed up to defend, and die for. I did not sign a pledge of loyalty to any one president or political party. I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, the Constitution of the United States of America. I signed up to defend the right to freely protest, to freely speak, and to freely think. I signed up for the Miranda rights, for the right of Standing Rock protestors to sue the government, for class action lawsuits holding the government accountable for lead in the water in Flint, Michigan. This is something we so frequently take for granted, and yet something I have seen others fight and die to try to reach.
Happy Independence Day.
More discussion on this in future posts. Please see my public bio for more info. There are some things that are really difficult for me to talk about. Writing about them helps me considerably. There were some things that were locked away, or that I couldn’t talk about, that I’m now able to. I understand that it’s frustrating. Please give me a little bit of patience to write it all out.