Dunnage

 

So.

Turns out that the "silence" of the night, the cease-fireworks I mentioned yesterday?

Had nothing to do either with the City rules or the fire-safety inclinations of the good people of Portland, but, just like in the movies, the "it's quiet...too quiet" silence before the French and Indians attack.

Last night the first ranging shots were fired before sundown, and by full dark the streets were exploding with all the illegal-goodness I thought the City had shut down. 

Mortars, Roman candles, fire fountains...all the bounty of mainland China was bursting in air to celebrate the 247th birthday of the Land of the Free.

Which, by the way, I remarked only through the front windows. It was a hot sultry night, and I wasn't arsed enough to go sit out in the heat and mosquitoes to watch the fire-for-effect. It was pretty ferocious, though, as the traditional scattering of dunnage at the intersection of North McKenna and Amherst Streets testifies.

Which kind of got me thinking about the whole "why-do-I-hesitate-to-wave-the-flag" thing I also wrote yesterday.

Because I opened up the phone today to read something about how some Republican nitwit had lead off his Fourth paean to Ammurica with a made-up Patrick Henry quote about how we owe our independence to Christians.

"America is a Christian nation".

How many times have you read some "conservative" saying or writing that?

By which they mean that if you're NOT "Christian" (or something their idea of "Christian" hates, like queer or poor or Samaritan or liberal or something...) you're not really "American".

Which is, well, just shitty.

The entire promise of this country is based on an idea, not a religion or a language or a kind of food or clothing. The idea of "equal justice under law"; that if you believe in and defend the rights of all your fellow citizens who are equally committed to the ideals of the nation as expressed in the founding documents then you ARE an American.

So you can be an atheist-American, or an otaku-American, or a gay-, lesbian-, liberal-, conservative-, Rule34-American. If you buy the ideals expressed in things like the Declaration and the Constitution, you're an American.

Period.

That's something pretty awesome, when you stop to think about it.

There are people who have lived in Japan for generations and still aren't considered "Japanese" by the majority of Japanese.

There are people who have lived in Great Britain, or Poland, or Argentina who aren't considered, or treated, as true citizens of those nations, because they look or speak or act "differently" from the Platonic Ideal of a Briton or a Pole or an Argentine that's fixed in the public mind.

But the promise of the United States - and I say "promise", mind, not "reality" - is that if you believe in the promise you can be American.

The Founders made sure of that by making sure they didn't write religion in to those promises.

Too many of their ancestors had beat cheeks out of Britain because of the ugly remnants of the 16th and 17th Century Wars of Religion had made their kinds of "Christianity" (or lack of Christianity) something between rebellion and treason.

And they'd seen what the unholy marriage of political power and religious sectarianism had done to both politics and religion.

It was bad. 

For both.

So yes; a hell of a lot of the people who were responsible for the design of this country were Christians.

But no; they explicitly designed the country to include all blends and shades of belief - including no belief at all - by making religion a personal, not a political, choice.

Which leads me back to yesterday.

It seems to me that we are on the cusp of having to make a hard choice, a choice foisted upon us by people like the Republican nitwit cited above (Josh Hawley? Sound like the sort of Christopathic fathead who would say something like that).

We the People can choose to become the nation our Constitution promises us we can be; a nation open to all who believe in those promises.

Or we can become the nation people like Josh Hawley promise us; a nation open only to those who believe and act like they do.

I know which nation would make me proud.

Do We the People?

Of that, I am honestly unsure.

When you're unsure that your own country truly believes, and wants to make true, the promises that you love about that country?

It's hard to be vigorous about waving its flag.

All you can do is police up the dunnage.

And hope.