Independence

Some people are upset with the following post. It seems ot be negative and pointless on a day we all need to look up to the greatness of America, to celebrate our nation while most of the world's people condemn us.

I'd hoped that in the post below I would show that we are greater than all other nations because we are free to be people as individuals, independent of all but our own choices to be as we will. I consider that to be the greatest freedom of all, the freedom of will to be, whether for good or ill. Below I try to celebrate our freedom in the harsh light of our lives as they are. I do not try to paint our lives as pretty if they aren't. I show the negative side of one small town and hope that in doing so one will see the greatness of it in its struggle to rise above and keep on to find the better. We can try, whereas almost no one else on Earth can, and in that choice we are blessed.

My little town, populated by the dead and the dying, is a town of men and women who live lives of their own making, and in that they are blessed with a freedom to choose what few others can. That, friend, is our greatness. America is not perfect. America is what we make of it in a harsh world, and we are free to live as we will. When we live rightly we are supreme. And when we fail we do so by our own free choice. Below, in spite of the harshness, I celebrate our independence. Without the right to do evil we are nothing. And we are independent.

Friend, do you know how blessed you are?
****

I stopped in my home town a few years ago, stayed a few days with a girl I picked up on the road, and while we were there I showed her around the town.

This is my friend ....'s old home. He was a goofy kid, got hooked on heroin, robbed a gas station, went to prison for two years, got out and died the next night at our friend's house. Larry'd been off the heroin so long he wasn't ready for it, and he over-dosed the first time he shot up.

Over here at the lake I lost four buddies on highschool graduation night, four losers who didn't graduate. They were drunk for about the first times in their lives, they being drug users not used to drinking. They got drunk and went into the lake and drowned. One, sitting trapped in the back seat, drowning, gripped a beer can so tightly the top broke off.

Over here at the motel one of our friends was trying to shoot up methadrine using a turkey baster with a tire pump needle, filling it from a soup ladle. He was one of the idiots who'd been in the truck on the hill with the cross street running running through the middle. The lot of them had stopped and I got in the back while they idled at the hilltop, shot up, and let out the clutch, hoping to level off half way and then descend again for a second rush. They all passed out and the truck hit a tree. At the motel they were all doping like fiends, not even noticing that a girl had died on the floor. That's our cabin there, next door.

And on the road right about here my pal passed out after getting drunk and he killed a woman and her kids as they were walking down the road. The police woke him up and gave him the bad news.

X was taking dope and it pissed off his mother that he kept stealing her stuff, so she got in her car and tried to run him over on the front lawn, and he got pissed off and shot her in the head with a shot gun.

And over here this kid was roller skating and another kid grabbed his arm and spun him, not really meaning to send him through a glass door. The kid who died had already been kicked in the balls so hard he'd had to be castrated.

That girl got pregnant when she was eleven, grade six.

My mom died there, all bones and colostomy bags filling up with dripping stuff.
****

I don't go home very often.

I don't go home, not because I cry in front of a girl I met on the road as I give her the tour of the town: I don't go home because I'm still curious about the whole world, and I can't be at home and elsewhere too. For all the bad things I recall there are more that were wonderful, things that make me happy to be alive. Yeah. I wonder; therefore I wander. Often I'm gone from my home town for a decade or more. I'll probably die some place far away. That'll be the end of that.

I don't get home very often, but America never leaves me. I remember nearly every day of my life as if I were watching a movie. When I die America will carry on just fine without me. Yeah, the bad stuff, the good stuff, what do you do?

It's the Fourth of July, and today I have to work on something I'd avoid forever if I could. Such is life. I'll cope. America will do what it does, and America will cope. I put on some music and I sing along with some fine gusto to an upbeat-tempoed tune, jazzy and swingin'.

In my little town
I grew up believing
God keeps his eye on us all
And he used to lean upon me
As I pledged allegiance to the wall
Lord I recall my little town
Coming home after school
Riding my bike past the gates of the factories
My mom doing the laundry
Hanging out shirts in the dirty breeze
And after it rains there's a rainbow
And all of the colors are black
It's not that the colors aren't there
It's just imagination they lack
Everything's the same back in my little town

In my little town I never meant nothing
I was just my father's son
Saving my money
Dreamin of glory
Twitching like a finger on a trigger of a gun

Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town
****

Down there at the bottom of the lake in the toolies, that's where my dad caught a bass so big that I chained it through the gills and hiked up the cliff to the road where I hung the fish on a post and pointed at it every time a car drove past till eventually the fish stank so bad I had to bury it.

I remember.

I remember the Fourth of July when the fireworks on the lake were so incredible that there has never again been anything like it, and the guys on the barge who blew up with it, they were shot through with sand from the lake bottom.

And the girl who was beaten to death while we stood looking from behind a rock on the shore, not even caring any longer at all about the crawdads getting away. And the horror, and the horror, and the horror? No, that's not it. That's life. It's hard and it ends.

I remember America. I don't remember being happy at all. Life was often very hard. Many, many people were murdered, more died young by violence, and more still were destroyed by life itself.

The horror? Yes, there was lots of it. I remember it. None of that makes any difference, really. It's not my life that determines the good of my nation. I remember my flag and my country, and regardless of my personal life I remember my nation as it is in itself. My town was good in spite of the personal things bad. My home was a good home in spite of the life I lived in it. It's nothing to do with me, not to do with my personal experiences. America? It's the Fourth of July, and nothing for good or for bad can change it. My life is not that important to anything, and not to America at all. I live the life of a man independent. I grew up, I went, I live.

I don't know if I've been clear here. I don't have anything to add. If it's muddled you'll have to make of it what you will, if anything. It's very late, and I'm going home to lay in bed where I'll close my eyes in the darkness, and there I will remember again, not my life but the life of my nation.