Our nation’s soul was born on the bloody fields of Bunker Hill, baptised at Gettysburg, and tested on the beaches of Normandy. Our nation’s people have overcome each great divide confronting them and still found common ground at Sunday service. Our nation’s strength is in our right to disagree — publicly, loudly, and often — with what our elected officials do in our names with our tax dollars.
But this is no guaranteed inheritance.
In recent weeks, very few federal agencies tasked with protecting our nation’s rule of law or her citizens have actually pushed back against the president’s attacks on our constitutional freedoms. Instead, it has fallen to the people to protest for these “inalienable” rights. Yet even this, as of late, has been twisted into a threat by the same elected officials who swore to uphold these exact constitutional guarantees.
When peaceful acts of protest are recast by the president as rebellion, all protesters run the risk of being labeled public enemies. Divided as we may be, this is a dark reality we must stand firmly against.
It is the weaponization of patriotism – a twisted view of the nation that guarantees rights for none lest they tow the party line. This mutation of national pride is what so many of our soldiers throughout history have died fighting to prevent. Despite their sacrifices, we the people are once again facing the growing threat of censorship and political retaliation on our nation’s doorstep. When the former director of the FBI as well as lawyers, journalists, scientists, and political activists all become enemies of the state via social media, one starts to fear for the state of the nation.
Make no mistake, the president is not using his Truth Social platform to protect our interests abroad or our citizens at home. In reality, social media and the National Guard have become the president’s personal goon squad against political dissent. If the White House were actually concerned for citizens’ safety, they would move to address the very real threat of mass shootings at schools and churches. Or they would address the rural healthcare crisis. Or they would continue to fund veterans’ mental health programs.
Further, much of the evidence that the president holds up as proof that Portland, especially, needs help is actually from 2020. It appears as though the White House hopes the faith of the American public in its national government will blind them to the blatant falsehoods it’s spinning on social media about its latest political targets.
Yet when faced with very real aggression by very real enemies, such as Russia’s growing encroachment on Polish and Ukrainian airspace, the president instead called for a ruthless investigation as to who shut off his escalator during his recent visit to the United Nations. America, once the nation of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, is now the nation that can’t take the stairs.
When London was facing utter destruction night after night for eight months during the Blitz, its citizens sang and prayed and volunteered in droves with what became known as “the Blitz Spirit.” It was their resilience, not their suffering, that made them great.
It’s time we find our own “Blitz Spirit” before our states slip further under the waves of federal aggression. We must find the commonality to fight our enemies both foreign and domestic, those who wish to see our patriotism used against patriots as a weapon to silence us, to humble us, to shackle us.
As civil rights activist Rep. John Lewis once said, “We must accept one central truth and responsibility as participants in a democracy: freedom is not a state, it is an act. It is not some enchanted garden perched high on a distant plateau where we can finally sit down and rest. Freedom is the continuous action we all must take, and each generation must do its part to create an even more fair, more just society.”
The ability of our citizens to live in accordance with the highest ideals of our nation — including the freedom to criticize the government — is only made a reality through action. If we hope to protect these freedoms gifted to us by our Founding Fathers, fought for by our soldiers, honored by our patriots, and nurtured by the blood of countless American heroes, then we cannot rest in the enchanted garden of misinformation and fear growing among the shambles of the Rose Garden at The White House.
We must rise up and continue to make, as Lewis said, “good trouble, necessary trouble,” before we are no longer afforded the right.
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