When I look at the star-spangled banner, I think of my son who began wearing a uniform with the flag on it from the time he went into scouting at the age of 6. I also think of one of the last pictures taken of Casey when he was awaiting deployment to Iraq from Kuwait. He was standing in a tent holding a bottle of water, wearing his desert cammies with an American flag patch on the chest. When we buried him a few weeks after that picture was taken, I was handed a folded flag, which reminded me of the swaddling blanket that I wrapped him in to bring him home from the hospital almost 25 years before.
The star-spangled banner, which I can now see whipping in the wind outside an airport terminal where I am writing this, does not fill me with pride: it fills me with shame, and that flag symbolizes sorrow and corruption to me right now. The flag represents so much lying, fixed elections, profiting by the war machine, high gas prices, spying on Americans, rapid erosion of our freedoms while BushCo literally gets away with murder, torture and extreme rendition, contaminating the world with depleted uranium, and illegal and immoral wars that are responsible for killing so many. A symbol that used to represent hope to so many around the world now fills so many with disgust.
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America's Independence Day - a time for BBQs, hot dog eating contests, fireworks and flag waving. Not for Cindy Sheehan who, in the company of other well known activists like Willie Nelson, Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn, Ed Asner, Patch Adams and even Canada's NDP MP Libby Davis along with so many other committed people, have begun a fast for peace.
While Bush pumped up and his chest and sweated like the warmongering militant he is as he gave a predictable stay the course speech at Fort Bragg today - a message that is as stale as his presidency - his minions once again asserted that a free press which reported the latest news that a soldier had been charged with rape and murder of Iraqi citizens would actually cause America to 'lose the war'. No, it's not the fact that America has lost respect and trust around the world due to Bush's distorted vision and policies. It's that the media has the audacity to sometimes tell the truth.
Many Americans are so unsophisticated that they refuse to believe anything bad about their country. They regard acceptance of unpalatable truths as disloyalty. This failure of American character is why Bush has been able to get away with transgressions that scream out for his impeachment and trial as a war criminal. (Paul Craig Roberts)
On this day, those who are painfully familiar with that truth, like Cindy Sheehan and so many others who have lost family members and friends in a war that was based on lies, it is encouraging that a majority of Americans understand that the war was, indeed, pointless. But that simple realization is not enough.
While Americans express their pride in their country and recall their day of independence that set the country on a new and hopeful course of freedom, they must also take stock of what they are truly willing to sacrifice to ensure those ideals remain a real promise in the face of what has occured under the Bush administration: the stripping away of rights and liberties, the inhumane regime of torture, the corruption of America's once hallowed institutions, the surrender of politicians to a dictatorial president who has wrought an endless 'time of war', the far-reaching authority he has granted himself as though he alone knows what's best for the country, the destruction of a democracy that once gave inspiration, the desecration of an election process that invited equal representation, the greed of big business subsidized by taxpayer money, the ever-filling war chests of companies in the military industrial complex, and - never to be forgotten - the loss of life, limb and hope of thousands of coalition soldiers and even larger numbers of Iraqi civilians.
For what?
Those are the circumstances that demand reflection on this day if Americans are to truly understand this country that they celebrate. It is not enough to celebrate the promise. There must come a day again when Americans can celebrate the reality.
And, on this day, that time seems incredibly far from reach.
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