Thread: Let’s be honest, this might be the least surprising thing to come this week. We live in a time where the history of things only matters if it’s convenient. For example, the emancipation proclamation monument is being threatened,
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not because of what it stands for, not because of it’s symbolism, and not because of who paid for it (former slaves) but because the untrained, ignorant passer by may mistake various nuanced aspects for an opposite message.
It makes sense that a crowd of such spoiled, bored, and angry people would take issue with a song so scared people have charged into battle to defend their rights with only its melody as inspiration.
A song that, to most Americans, paints a picture of surviving the unsurvivable for our first time as a nation defending an attack, simply because we are the “home of the brave” and “land of the free.”
They want to abandon this song because some liberal professor provocateur has convinced them digging up the ghost of Francis Scott Key and executing what is now much more than “his” legacy somehow solves today’s problems.
I could care less what a semi-pro soccer team in Tulsa does, I can’t imagine their fan base stretches beyond friends and family, so maybe the random cisgender anti-patriot will borrow money from their hard working parents to attend a game in honor of this brave and righteous act.
But I do know what this song stands for. I know it doesn’t discriminate or oppress, in fact, it inspires us to fight against those things. The feeling I get in my heart, the chill on my neck, that brief moment acknowledging generationally shared sacrifice at a ball game
or any other indulgence of American prosperity matters. It matters the men and women buried at Arlington, it matters the grieving mothers in attendance, the newly minted citizens hearing it as an American for the first time, and my son lookind up at his visibly flawed father.
It’s nothing more than a song and nothing less than heartbeat. We are better today than yesterday, we are eternally in search of, not just freedom, but fairness and equality in those freedoms, not in spite of our mistakes, but in light of them.
