O Say Can You See
Protesting and Dissonance
When the Women’s March in San Diego, California on January 21, 2017 began it was just starting to sprinkle. Rain sets San Diegans on edge. Lack of sun is a Californian’s natural enemy; even the silhouette of a hawk above that makes us dash for shelter. Surprisingly — maybe even alarmingly — the marchers seemed wholly unfazed. They hardly said a word as they donned their ponchos and umbrellas.
Today, rain or shine, they were here with a purpose.
A slew of representatives from various women’s rights organizations took to the stage to rile up the crowd, an alphabet soup of acronyms I was too far away to really hear. Soon after, a woman was brought to the mic stand and began singing the national anthem.
In the wake of recent events, that song is loaded with perhaps more complicated meaning than ever before. It’s had its history picked apart, its composer reamed for his pro-slavery sentiments, and its use as a symbol of nationalism and American exceptionalism subjected to every iconoclasm short of actual flag-burning.
There are progressives who see little to no value in nationalism. Maybe I see a little. Just a little, though.
“O say can you see,
by the dawn’s early light”
When the song started, I half-expected the crowd to take a Kaepernick knee as those first notes wafted over a march characterized by love for the disenfranchised. A sudden hush fell over the crowd, like the one that usually falls over a football stadium when it’s sung there, but this one was longer, more contemplative, perhaps even more conflicted.
I looked to the people around me and saw entire conversations playing out across their faces. I saw people asking themselves what the song really meant to them, people challenging their narratives and wondering if nationalism in moderation is acceptable despite its many pitfalls, people struggling with how being an iconoclast can disrupt many of the constants of identity that help us maintain a clear and consistent definition of who we are—all of us grappling with what to do with this song and ourselves.
Are we our nation’s children, waddling in its footsteps until the day we take our own paths? Or are we its parents, loving it unconditionally even when we have to rap its knuckles to teach it right from wrong?
“Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
through the perilous fight
o’er the ramparts we watched
were so gallantly streaming?”
At “whose broad stripes and bright stars,” someone in the crowd started to sing along. A few others joined her.
The song proved a rapid contagion. A couple lines later, we had all become her back-up singers, different in every conceivable way, but unified in this single message. We were, and are, fighting a perilous fight, sometimes against our own institutions, watching broad stripes and bright stars, of every color of the rainbow, gallantly streaming just beyond the ramparts.
In his book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Émile Durkheim says that a religion is legitimized when its worshipers undergo moments of “collective effervescence,” an almost dissociative state where the line between individual and collective is blurred through an experience bigger than any one self. And while we were certainly no church, we were participating in a ritual of cosmic importance. Some of us were there to protest an impending regime, some to make the case for women of color, or for policy informed by scientific research, but whatever our priorities were that day, we were all there.
We were our own people with our own beliefs and fears. But we were raised amid the same mythology, which spoke of a nation forged in revolution. And it was at the altar of this very nation, the altar of peaceable assembly, that we decided to forge a new one.
I looked around again. Some were smiling; others had tears in their eyes.
But they’d all reached a decision, even if they’d already forgotten their deliberation.
For all its jingoism, its imperialist habit of swooping down on resources both foreign and domestic, its militancy in the face of fascism as well as in the face of peaceful revolt — you can never say America backs down from a fight. You can never say Americans back down from a fight. We aren’t defined by those institutions that future generations will likely look back on as vestiges of barbarism. We’re defined by a constant pressure to move forward, to make things better, to be better ourselves, even if it means taking up whatever arms are available. Even if those arms are just signs with clever puns on them. We will get better. There is no other option.
The song, the flag, the statues and monuments — not a one of them isn’t fraught with contradiction and ambivalence. They cannot help but represent things we hate as well as things we love. We do all we can to dismantle these contradictions, but often we forget to reassemble them in better ways once we’re done. Occasionally, that takes steering into the skid, understanding that history is complex and amoral, divorced from whatever concepts of good and evil we happen to hold on a particular day.
Sometimes change means embracing the longstanding injustices while we shoot them in the heart. Sometimes it means punching a Nazi in the face.
“And the rockets’ red glare,
the bombs bursting in air,
gave proof through the night
that our flag was still there.”
Since 1814, and long before, the fight has proven we’re still real, a Camusian affirmation that we are defined not by the outcome, but by the struggle towards it. America is alive and kicking, or else it’s neither.
Standing with these human beings, joined in song, draped in ponchos and contradictions, I spotted a sign in the distance: “Protest is Patriotism.” The song reached its final lines.
“O’er the land of the free.”
Increasingly, we hope.
“And the home of the brave.”
Doubtlessly, we know.
And then, we marched.
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