On a dank and dreary Independence Day Tuesday, I travelled to a neighboring town to attend daily Mass. The celebrant was a visiting priest – a kindly retired priest who was so old that he didn’t always exert enough vocal strength to be quite heard. In his homily, he spoke of the blessings of political liberty enjoyed by citizens of the U.S., and cautioned against the risk of taking our blessings for granted, since we’ve never really known any other reality.
But then he said something which really struck me. He called the congregation to remember the events of January 6th, 2021, and to think about how close the country came to falling to a military coup, and how quickly and easily it could happen. I immediately agreed with his statement, although I couldn’t be sure what he meant. I know nothing about this priest apart from his name, and had no idea if his thoughts reflected a belief in the manufactured narrative of an attempted insurrection by Trump’s rioting supporters, and the threat posed by that. Or, if it was a reference to the response to the riot by the Biden administration and their allies in law enforcement, the intel agencies, Congress, and the yellow press. The months-long barricading of the Capitol and deployment of National Guard troops certainly comes closer to at least looking like a military coup than does the violent temper tantrums of the selfie-stick armed crowd that were led into the Capitol on January 6th. However, in neither event was the regular military involved at all. So it’s hard to make heads or tails of his concern, and I really have no idea how he interprets the whole sorry thing.
Nonetheless, I realized that he was right concerning the fragility of the public order, and of the political and civil freedoms facilitated by that public order, and which too many of us – myself included – do in fact take too much for granted.
Like many, I don’t quite recognize my country anymore, all of a sudden. The spirit of freedom which for two centuries grounded this nation – the Spirit of ‘76 – seems to have sputtered out in the long nightmare that was the Covid-19 panic. We traded our freedom for safety, and ended up with neither. Instead, “safety” is now invoked as a claim to justify suppression of uncomfortable ideas. We’re all being asked to collude daily in lies by dishonest language police. It is increasingly difficult to find trustworthy people.
The fabric is fraying. Old Glory has seen better days. I’m not optimistic about American society, at least not in the short run. Without trust, there can be no order in civic life. And it’s awfully hard to know who can be trusted these days. In God We Trust, sure, but… who else?