I Miss Our Country

I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the cradle of our democracy. I don't know if it was where I was that gave me the picture of the United States of America that I have. All I know is that I grew up in the place where they cracked the Liberty Bell and wrote the Constitution.

When I was growing up, I was taught about that Constitution. I was taught that I had rights and that you had rights and that my rights ended where yours began. There was a price for my rights, and it was that I must not deprive you of yours. My teachers told me that I was fortunate to live in a country where I could choose my religion, my friends, could read what I wanted, write and say what I wanted, and was generally free from tyranny. It never crossed my mind either that my teachers were naive to say so, or that I was naive to believe them.

Then somebody hijacked our country.

People started saying this was a "Christian Country." I stayed on my side of my rights, and did not shout them down. This is a secular country. We don't have a national religion (Thanks be to my personal deity!) that everyone must follow. How could I have been so wrong? I did not see the hand writing on the wall when the "moral majority" rose in the 80s. I knew they were neither, and I assumed that others saw that as well. How wrong I was. A whole lot of people bought their story and their "vision" and the results for democracy and freedom were bad, very bad.

I had no clue about the perfidy of the religious right, as long as I was a "practicing Christian." Then we got into the wrong war for the wrong reason at the wrong time, and this enlightened me.

When I protested that "Thou shalt not kill," applied to our so-called enemies, I was called unpatriotic. This offended me, but since I was still free to express myself, I did not retaliate, since it was both un-Christian and not in the spirit of Democracy, the kind with a capital D. Again, how wrong I was!

Yesterday, I hung some posters in public places that called for political action. Within a short time, someone had torn down one of my posters. At first I thought, "This is someone else's exercise of free speech." Then I realized that it was someone else's attempt to deprive me of my right of free speech. I fished my poster out of the trash can, smoothed it out, and put it back up in all its rumpled glory. The truth is that I hope someone will see the damage done to my poster and realize what I did. That we are now operating under an unspoken set of rules that are antithetical to Democracy, freedom, and personal liberty.

I am deeply grieved for the loss of my personal freedom, and I am also newly committed to becoming a burr under the saddle of those who think our country will be better served by making ours a homogeneous society, composed of people who don't think, but act in accordance with the party line.

I used to be a lot more moderate in my pursuit of happiness. I used to think I was pursuing personal goals. I realize now that my happiness consists of helping return this country to a place where people were allowed to worship as they pleased, think what they pleased, and say what they pleased. I miss that place, and I'm going to try to help get it back. Do join me.