It’s hard to comprehend, understand, and accept what is going on in this country.
I keep going back to the movie, “The Sound of Music,” where in the last scenes, Christopher Plummer, who played Captain von Trapp, sings “Edelweiss” as his family makes its last appearance before they flee Austria. He has decided not to give in to pressure being put on him to join the navy of Nazi Germany.
I had no idea about what Edelweiss was; I only knew that he looked very sad and was singing it as a tribute, to his beloved country, which was being taken over by the Nazis. The flower was and is known to be strong and able to survive in the harshest of Alpine weather. Perhaps he was stating that his beloved Austria would likewise survive.
As he chokes up toward the end of the song, his entire family comes out and joins in, and prompts the audience to join in as well. The song ends, the family leaves the stage, and then begins its trek out of Austria. Everything that they have known has changed; the Edelweiss will remain the same, and that brings some degree of comfort, even in the midst of von Trapp’s profound sadness.
America seems to be getting to a state where many Americans will fall back on memories of a country that changed right before their eyes. It seems that we are being led into an exile of sorts; it seems that we, like the Israelites in the Hebrew scriptures, will sit on the banks of our own River of Babylon and weep as we remember this country when there was a semblance of civility and a commitment to democracy, even though the promises made in our founding documents were never realized.
As much as I think of “Edelweiss,” I think of Psalm 137, where the psalmist writes:
By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we sept when we remembered Zion.
On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there our captors asked us for songs and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land” If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither! Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember you, if I don’t set Jerusalem above my highest joy,
Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!” (Psalm 137:1-7, NRSV)
Those who despise democracy are working intentionally to tear this government down, and while they say that there exists a “deep state” (which is true) what they are proposing is not the end of the deep state but the creation of a new deep state, a state in which the freedoms that Americans have enjoyed will be stripped away. Already, we see the freedoms being attacked; we see state governments imposing rules and making laws that make it difficult if not impossible for teachers to teach what they want; we see politically irate parents bombarding school boards demanding that the history of some groups of people not be taught; we see people burning books like the Nazis did as they destroyed the German government as it had been. (https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/pithinthewind/theyre-burning-books-in-tennessee/article_1f8c631e-850f-11ec-bc9f-dbd44d7e14d7.html) We hear the former president saying things like military generals who oppose him are treasonous and should be executed (https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/politics/milley-donald-trump-execution-comment/index.html) and we hear him say that if he is reelected, some news operations will not be allowed to be on the air.( https://thehill.com/homenews/4221310-trump-pledges-to-investigate-msnbc-parent-for-threatening-treason/#:~:text=Trump%20pledges%20to%20investigate%20MSNBC%20parent%20company%20for%20%27threatening%20treason%27,-by%20Rachel%20Scully&text=Former%20President%20Trump%20pledged%20to,%2C%20things%2C%20and%20events.”).
America was never all it claimed to be. It was built on a broken foundation, one that pushed capitalism by using and exploiting people brought to this country for that reason alone. The country was built on a broken obelisk, which meant from the beginning that as the country grew it would not be able to withstand the pressure and the weight that comes with growth. (Ancient Egyptians refused to continue to build the obelisk once they discovered it was cracked. It sits unfinished to this day. https://mymodernmet.com/unfinished-obelisk-aswan-egypt/)
America had chances to correct some of what was wrong and what would continually weaken it, but reneged. It forged ahead, giving in to greed and the raw desire for power, ignoring the creaking of a government that was not able to withstand the seedbeds of racism and sexism. While it touted its “democracy,” the whole world watched and knew that America was not all it claimed to be. Other democracies imitated America’s racist practices; the Nazis actually studied America’s race laws in the creation of their own.
What this country failed to embrace was the impossibility of a country built on a cracked foundation being able to withstand the winds of bigotry, enmity, and greed as time went on. When the former president was elected, I remember being shocked when one of my social media friends said “Democracy needs to end.” I was stunned.
But it is a fact that there are groups of people working to do just that – end democracy. Big business is running the country and the politicians are allowing it – and some appear to be actively participating in the process.
I keep seeing Christopher Plummer singing “Edelweiss,” and I keep referring to Psalm 137. It seems that we are on our way to the shores of a river in a country we once thought we knew – and I say “we” in a pejorative sense, because many Americans were never included in the benefits of being American. They were not even considered to be citizens…yet, they held onto hope that one day this country would be what it professed to be.
My thought is, though that none of us really knew the real America at all, and are about to be made to reckon with that. Maybe, in spite of all the warning signs and flashing lights that have been a part of our government for hundreds of years, we will learn the hard way that silence is complicity, and for that, we will be forced to sing an “American” song in a strange land.
A candid observation …
Candid Observations 