Let me open with some predictions:
10 minutes before Obama’s Independence Day remarks are publicized, he will be slammed on FOXNews for revealing his disdain of America: “Never before has a President of the United States, whatever his skin color may be, treated his country with such total disregard for its heritage and traditions of liberty and freedom.”
10 minutes after his remarks are publicized, FOXNews will protest his politicization of our national holiday: “Never before in our history has a President, whatever his skin color may be, exploited our national holiday in such a cynical and shameless self-serving partisan manner.”
Happy 4th to all. I recommend reading the Declaration aloud. I do so every year, especially since I’ve had kids. It really is the “Never Mind the Bollocks” of political rhetoric. 3 and 4 generation ago, my forebears arrived here in search of economic opportunity and civil liberty. Things generally ended badly for their relatives who could not or did not follow.
One of my aunts told me a few years ago about a community event she attended. An old man approached her and asked her if she was Sam Garelck’s grand daughter. When she affirmed this, he told he: “I knew Sam Garelick. Always paid his bills.” Then he walked away. Sam Garelick came from Bobruysk in Belarus, after having survived 15 years in the Czar’s cavalry. Jews were heavily conscripted and forced to abandon their traditions. He married had two children, saved enough money to get himself here in steerage. He had a cousin in Salt Lake City of all places, who provided him with a horse and wagon. He began collecting cast off items, fixing them up, and selling them. Within two years, he had his own junk shop and enough money to bring his wife and two children over. 10 months after their arrival, my Bagel Bubbe (known with this moniker for the bagels she baked) gave birth to my great aunt Mary who passed away only 3 months ago. Guess they missed each other. Aunt Mary earned a BSc in education and taught kindergarten in public schools for over fifty years. But I digress, as usual. When my aunt told me about her Zayde’s friend wanting her to know that he “always paid his bills,” she laughed. But he was trying to tell her something profound. He came here and he made it. He succeeded and did so ethically and with integrity. He was, in their lingo, an “alrightnik.” Not only did he escape the calamities of WWI, WWII, and the Shoah, he achieved something. And he did so in a country that should be celebrated for its promise, even as the grandness of that promise has left a great deal to be realized. It’s to Sam Garelick’s credit that he made it. It’s also a credit to the possibilities in this country. But as progressives, we recognize that the promise of America demands that we improve it, broaden it, and fulfill it, so that this promise becomes more egalitarian and inclusive.
Freedom and equality have been opposed too often in history. But unless one holds to an exclusively negative conception of freedom, the freedom from things, then we see that one cannot exist without another. The base of the Statue of Liberty bears a sonnet, entitled “The New Colosus,” penned by a Jewish poet named Emma Lazarus:
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Yet a few decades later, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem gestured to the ironic reality of immigrant life in America when one of his characters gave this report to his peers in the “Old Country” on what he found there:
First of all-the land itself. A land flowing with milk and honey. People make money left and right. Beggars use two hands. They rake it in. And there’s so much business there, it makes you dizzy. You do whatever you please. Want a factory-it’s a factory. Want to open a store-fine. Want to push a pushcart, that’s permitted, too. Or you can be a pedlar, even work in a shop! It’s a free country. You can swell from hunger, die in the street, and no one’ll bother you, no one’ll say a word.
From “On America”
Freedom yes. Freedom as abandonment to poverty, illness, and death. Freedom from healthcare. I ask conservatives today who want to repeal “Obamacare,” if healthcare isn’t a right, what is it? An asset? A commodity? A luxury? A privilege?
So listen to Bruce Springsteen’s magnificent melding of idealism and realism in “Darkness on the Edge of Town” today. We have an obligation to the founders and to people like Sam Garelick to increase the equality that increases freedom. “Go America” indeed. Let’s get it where it needs to go.
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