REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM

Saturday, July 5, 2008

(PAI)Independence Day, 2008

REFLECTIONS ON INDEPENDENCE AND FREEDOM
by Mark Gruenberg

    Another Independence Day has been celebrated, complete with the now-familiar rituals of parades, pompous speeches, fireworks, pompous speeches, backyard barbeques, and still more speeches--many of the wrap-ourselves-in-the-flag style.
    But Independence Day should be a day when we pause to consider what the colonists fought for from 1775-1783: Freedom and independence, in the full meanings of those words.
    Discussing those concepts takes on particular significance this year. A decorated Vietnam veteran, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), and a non-veteran who repeatedly praises the U.S. as the only nation where he could have come so far, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), seek the presidency. And baseless rumors are rife in the “blogosphere” questioning Obama’s patriotism, because his father was Kenyan, because he spent part of his youth overseas, or because he does not wear a flag pin.
    But what is true patriotism? And what is the independence and freedom the colonists fought for against Britain? These questions are relevant to workers.
    That’s because mindless bombastic my-country-right-or-wrong patriotism leads to the view that any dissent from the “norm”--such as unionists opposing the concocted poverty and created criminality by the corporate class and their political puppets--is somehow “unpatriotic.” The flag pin has become a symbol of such mindlessness.
    Let’s start with that my-country-right-or-wrong statement. That’s the first version
of the quote, from Admiral Stephen Decatur in a toast in 1816: “Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right. But our country, right or wrong.”   Note that even through Decatur’s jingoism, his key word is “may,” implying that sometimes the nation is wrong and its citizens need to set it right, not to unfailingly and blindly follow mistaken leaders like sheep.
    What Decatur implied, the great Republican liberal statesman Carl Schurz, who fled the failed Austro-Hungarian revolution of 1848 for the freedom of the U.S., made explicit at the anti-imperialism conference in Chicago in 1899: “Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right. When wrong, to be put right.”
    That is the spirit of patriotism, and freedom, in which both Obama and McCain speak--and George W. Bush does not. Regardless of whether you agree with their policy positions, both senators see things they believe wrong and want to put them right.
    That, we submit, is true patriotism--not the mindless jingoistic flag-waving of the Radical Right, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
    And “put it right” patriotism is also a key reason for the union movement.
    Unions exist to help workers put working conditions “right.” We curb the excesses of unrestrained corporate capitalism. We attempt to form what the Constitution calls “a more perfect union” of people in the U.S., by trying to give to everyone the opportunity to better themselves and to fully participate in society.
    And unions provide a key vehicle for legitimate needed protest and action when there is a “wrong”--be it substandard wages, inhumane working conditions, unsafe jobs
or lack of political power vis-à-vis the criminal corporate elite.
    Such “put it right” patriotism, by working men and women as well as by Barack Obama and John McCain, is, we submit, the real patriotism.   The flag-waving jingoistic, follow-the-leader-blindly “patriotism” too often seen or heard in the bombastic speeches of Independence Day (and other times) is not.
    Indeed, bombast, blind obedience and kowtowing to power are found, or forced, in dictatorships and non-democratic regimes.   Unions are shams or not present in such nations. True patriotism, as we define it above, is squashed. Think “Burma.”
     So as we mark another Independence Day, let us reflect on its true meaning, not just in terms of pride of country, but in terms of pride of what our country is supposed to stand for: Freedom, liberty, independence and, “when wrong, to be put right.”
    And we in unions--not the jingoists--are the true patriots, because we’re helping to put it right.
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