Gary Anderson: Honoring our revolutionary heritage
The most celebrated day of summer is Independence Day. A day of parading our heritage of hard-won freedom from oppressive governance and the creation of a principled embrace of equality for everyone. The sovereignty of our new nation would now be subject to the self-governing autonomy of collective individual empowerment. Not too shabby an idealistic accomplishment for a bunch of all-white, all-male British outliers who knew how to transform a Tea Party into the defeat of colonial rule while still rationalizing the economics of slavery, the subjugation of indigenous peoples, and the second-class citizenship of women. Traditionally, above all else, the Fourth of July’s stars and stripes strutted patriotism tops off its meritorious if cherry-picked reverence with an awesome display of inspirational pyrotechnics symbolizing America’s birthday conceived and realized by armed revolution. The still resounding “Shot Heard Round the World” was about violent change achieved by citizen-controlled weaponry later bestowed as a fundamental right by the Second Amendment. That’s a lot of politically charged history-making, mostly compelled by still unreconciled complex concepts about freedom and its protection, about sovereignty and its problematic border with hegemony.
This year marks America’s 243rd anniversary. We celebrate that long history of what we still hold as a peace-loving nation even though our country’s been at war almost continually since its inception. We are at war now. It’s a chronic affliction that we suffer almost without acknowledgment, not through stoicism but because less than 1% of Americans carry that water for the rest. They do all the heavy lifting, so far away from American life that most of us can’t even identify the geographical location with any exactitude. The price is so exorbitant that our government literally has no accurate assessment of the actual cost. The Department of Defense is an immense unaccountable pie slice of an economy addicted to funding its insatiable “budget” because it remains such a formidable capitalist engine. Cowed by patriotism, we write a blank check and leave an ever-mounting national debt to our children and grandchildren while we even more shamefully deny rightful payment towards taking care of our veterans. We surely must make our Founding Fathers and Old Glory proud.
Those who laid the foundation for our nation never dreamed of America becoming the largest standing military force the world has ever known. Their idea of sovereignty wasn’t imagined as ever being worldwide, nor predicated on domineering a “Global” economy. They never conceived that America’s might would grow so large that it would endanger the planet itself, that what would fuel it would unalterably change the climate and become our greatest threat to national security. That’s not the exaggerated rhetoric of alarmist environmentalism. That’s our own military’s repeated assessment despite Congress’s continued deafness.
All of the above sets the stage for what’s become familiar political theater attendant to each christening ceremony at BIW. Instead of spending the first weekend of summer relaxing, 22 activists chose to be arrested for protesting yet another paradoxical defense product purportedly necessary for America’s already excessive national security when actually part and parcel of the greatest threat to our planetary survival. Nine of those revolutionaries made the additional commitment of opting for jail over bail to gain additional media attention.
Last time around, the local DA dismissed all charges so as to dissuade even more celebrity to those breaking the law, denying the desired notoriety underpinning the purposeful violation of the law for the sake of exposing an ultimately far, far greater disturbance of the peace in aiding and abetting the continuance of militarism.
Maybe BIW doesn’t deserve to be the ground zero of such protest, but it’s definitely part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Granted, it tried to support sustainable clean energy by potentially building wind turbines, but the political winds of a divisively becalmed and rudderless governance ultimately left the otherwise fully on board shipbuilder high and dry. Conversion wasn’t its goal but rather diversification in championing an apolitical bottom line. Its ironic communist-built Chinese drydock stands testimony to the vagaries of a global economy’s core allegiance to profitability, foremost and forever.
Connecting the dots has never been our patriotic forte. Our political forte has been to separate the dots as far as possible. Today’s BIW protesters and those long-ago revolutionary Tea Party participants have more than a little in common.
Gary Anderson lives in Bath.
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