A semiprofessional soccer teams in Tulsa has decided to throw away our national anthem. Let’s be honest, this might be the least surprising thing to come of this week.
We live in a time where the history of things only matters if it’s convenient. For example, the Emancipation Proclamation monument is being threatened, not because of what it stands for, not because of its symbolism, and not because of who paid for it (former slaves), but because the untrained, ignorant passerby may mistake various nuanced aspects for an opposite message.
In such times it makes sense that a crowd of such spoiled, bored, misguided and angry people would take issue with a song so scared Americans have charged into battle to defend “their” rights with only its melody as inspiration. A song that, to most Americans, paints a picture of surviving the unsurvivable … written during a time when our nation was under attack … simply because we are the “home of the brave” and “land of the free.”
The feeling I get in my heart, the chill on my neck, that brief moment acknowledging generationally shared sacrifice at a ball game or any other indulgence of American prosperity matters. It matters to the men and women buried at Arlington, to the grieving mothers in attendance, to the newly minted citizens hearing it as an American for the first time, and to my son looking up at his visibly flawed father.
It’s nothing more than a song and nothing less than a heartbeat. We are better today than yesterday, we are eternally in search of, not just freedom, but fairness and equality in those freedoms, not in spite of our mistakes, but in light of them.
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