Dale Short's article

Hmm...so now I ought to post an article, and include a link to the site.

Cool.

The article:

Bright Hopes, Dark Thoughts on Independence Day

By Dale Short

My granddaughter, who's almost three years old, has a surprise for me. She clears her small throat, focuses her eyes with great seriousness on some distant spot, and begins to sing:

"O beautiful for spacious skies,
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain..."

No matter how many hundred times I've heard "America the Beautiful" before, hearing it sung now—by a child who carries some of my blood—suddenly washes away all those other, inferior, versions of the song like dust carried off by a bountiful summer rain. Her face shows no doubt. She sees what she's singing about, the grace and the brotherhood and the shining seas, and she makes me see it too.

If we can coax her into singing it again on the Big Day, I'm thinking, sometime between the barbecue and the fireworks, it'll be a huge hit with the family. But at the same time, her certainty frightens me.

Darrah just missed being born on the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, just missed the invisible sad birthmark shared by the 10,000 or so other American kids who came into the world on Sept. 11, 2001.

She takes for granted, as all children should, that her freedom is assured. Either way, she's too young to have any control over the matter. I, on the other hand, do have some control, however limited. And my own track record at helping protect Darrah's freedom, over the past three years, is not a spotless one.

Like millions of other Americans, I've often kept quiet when threats to our liberties and our well-being have surfaced. I was afraid of having my patriotism questioned, in a national atmosphere so explosive with rhetoric that the smallest spark of dissent can set off an ugly scene. But now our situation is growing worse by the day. I promise myself, for her sake, that in the months to come I'll be less reticent about speaking up in public. Here are some reasons why:

If "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the good health to enjoy those blessings, then Darrah's freedom is seriously threatened by a presidential administration that has been bribed by rich companies into letting polluters literally write their own laws, which allow deadly levels of zinc, lead, and mercury into our drinking water and enough toxic smoke into our air to spur a national epidemic of childhood asthma.

Her freedom is threatened by a president who brags that his core constituency consists of "the haves and the have-mores," and then approves long-term funding cuts of some $50 billion for programs that are proven to benefit families: Head Start, Section 8 housing assistance, and Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition services.

Her freedom is threatened by a government that runs a historic spending deficit (translation: borrows money) to finance bonuses and giveaways to the corporations that fund the Bush campaign. The bill for this largesse, of course, will fall to our children and grandchildren when they reach an age to support families of their own. And the officials who dug us deepest into the hole will be enjoying retirement, and free health care, on exactly the type of generous government pension that they so adamantly oppose for everyone but themselves.

Her freedom is threatened by millions of well-meaning people who are so confused by fear and hatred that they have convinced themselves of the impossible: that an almighty God can be shrunk to the size of a government, or that a government can be made as righteous as God. These people are so intent on bringing about this destructive theocracy that they're willing to wreck as many lives, and liberties, as necessary.

Her freedom is threatened by political handlers who make a farce of the classic line "and crown thy good with brotherhood" by viciously pitting rich against poor, and race against race, in order to score votes at any cost, while disingenuously accusing anyone who questions their divisive tactics of "playing politics."

Her freedom is threatened by the cynicism and hypocrisy of an administration that creates harsh new penalties for citizens who use questionable language on radio or television, but whose vice-president attacks a colleague with obscenities in the Senate chambers, and then gloats on television that he "felt much better" after doing so.

Her freedom is threatened by ideologues who set themselves up as supreme religious arbiters to quash vital scientific research, denying her and millions of other Americans life-giving breakthroughs that could someday protect them from Alzheimer's, diabetes, and other diseases.

Her freedom is threatened by a political movement that has set as its goal the complete destruction of American labor unions—unions that helped her own great-great-grandparents rise from the poverty of coal-mine laborers.

Her freedom is threatened by an administration that has so much contempt for the other nations of the world that it has broken its promises and treaties by the dozens, has spit in the face of diplomacy and protocols and even the most basic courtesy and decency.

Her freedom is threatened by an administration that has displayed on the world stage, through its vengeful policies inside Guantanamo Bay and inside Iraqi prisons, that it has no respect for the rule of law, thus creating more new enemies for America than in our worst nightmares.

Her freedom is threatened by a political party that simultaneously extols the wonders of democracy and yet works feverishly by hook or crook to prevent the votes of minority and low-income Americans from being counted at the polls.

And most immediately, her freedom is threatened by an administration that uses the fog of an open-ended "war," that could conceivably last for her entire lifetime, to methodically extract from its citizens, under cloak of secrecy, basic civil liberties that no sensible person would yield under any other circumstance.

Most frightening of all, perhaps, is the large percentage of Americans who can acknowledge this whole list of troubling developments and still argue that they're a fair trade-off in return for a president who can protect us from the very enemies that he seems so intent on multiplying.

It's not only a self-fulfilling prophecy, it's one of the great attempted scams in American history. And if enough of us stay quiet, if enough of us fall for the bait-and-switch routine, it's only a matter of time until my granddaughter one day looks up at our country's "spacious skies" she now sings about so proudly and sees them as the prison they can so easily become.

***
Good stuff from Dale.

Pax...