Battered and bruised, I strain to lift my hand. I place my hand over my heart and peer up through teary eyes at a tattered flag. My ears shut out the chaos of raucous music. I strain to ignore the din as the filthy, disheveled throngs surrounding me celebrate.
I march on against insults hurled in ignorance and fists raised in fictitious indignation. I press to put myself nearer to my flag, where my eyes can delight in her glory and take shield from the bastardized versions of my flag these cretins have hoisted in her stead. Despite a dry throat and a weakened voice, I summon a resounding and guttural command: “Shut up!” And the now-incredulous crowd falls silent in a heartbeat.
The revelers are shocked and recoil that I would dare raise my voice against them. They convinced themselves that they had dispatched me, and they respond to me in disbelief. Never did they solicit my opinion or seek to compromise with me. Never did they perceive that their brutish tactics would leave me dispassionately apathetic toward their ephemeral cause célèbre. Never did they imagine they would incite – in me – a deep disdain and resentment toward them. Never did they believe that I would resist. Never did they believe that I would refuse to allow them to convert me. Never did they believe that I would stand against their desecration of my flag.
I inhale sharply and begin to form my next word, when I am silenced by a sharp blow from behind. Entrenched amongst these vocal, ignorant partiers are insidious agitators, quiet agents of destruction who drip honey from their sharpened tongues. The crowd does not recognize them for the serpents they are. The crowd does not mourn the death of their souls. The crowd does not count down to the single remaining virtue of the society they have wrought.
The crowd has reduced its values to one solitary, but false, virtue: Sex. Every other message they preach is folly. Every other oration is purely self-adulatory. Every other utopian vision they promulgate is predicated upon false promises of the destructive agitators and the consuming temptation of sloth. The virtuous pillars, upon which their society long ago stood, have crumbled.
They do not understand that the snakes among them have fomented within their minds a deep hatred of people like me, and yet they respond with a visceral hatred while denouncing hatred itself as the only sin.
“Fascist!” they call me, not recognizing the origin of the practices they adopt to serve the agitators’ ends.
“Idiot!” they call me, not recognizing how they have abused our Republic into becoming its own reductio.
Epithets they call me, not recognizing their willful blindness to my inborn human dignity. And simultaneously they eulogize an ignominious overreach of the courts, a deleterious maneuver that merely dusted a thin veneer of superficial dignity onto the straw man of the day.
They applaud my assailant, ignorant of their self-wrought damnation. Over their cheers, I imagine the lilting notes soft on the air: “His truth is marching on”. As must I. I grasp at the mast, gaining purchase upon the silently steadfast lanyard from which my flag still waves. I pull myself up and I fill my chest with air. With every sinew strained, I intone a different hymn, “My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty.”
They lob a rock at my head, but I slump out of danger, hanging onto the lanyard to support myself. “From every mountainside let freedom ring!”
In the distance, I hear a weak voice reply: “Our fathers’ God, to thee, author of liberty, to thee we sing”.
And then, from across the plebeian void, another joins the chorus: “Long may our land be bright with freedom’s holy light.”
I pull myself up higher, I prick up my ears, and recognize yet more voices: “Protect us by thy might, great God, our King.”
Again, silence befalls the land.
In my mind, once more repeats the verse that beckoned me to stand, “His truth is marching on”. Again, I inhale. I summon the strength to cup a hand to my lips. I sing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”. I pause to swell my chest with another breath, for each tone I exhale resuscitates my patriotic soul.
More distant voices above the crowd join in. “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
Unexpectedly, a meek, small voice in the throng joins in, and the agitators wail at the visible transfiguration of one of their former loyalists: “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”
As more from the crowd accept the enlightenment, the verse comes to fruition, “His truth is marching on!”
I have been battered and bruised, but I am not alone. We have been battered and bruised, not upon a blood-drenched battlefield but in a sanctimony-dripping courtroom. Our hearts yearn to see liberty for all who seek the bounty of this land in heartfelt willingness to earn a share in her abundance. Our minds know decisively that no man shall be free who incorrectly perceives his rights as a gift from government or who fails to assume responsibility for limiting the rights he confers upon his government.
My lungs know in their most primal motion that their highest purpose is to proclaim boldly and to proclaim loudly the truth. Brutal though the words of truth may be to the ignorant multitude, difficult though the task may be against popular folly, scathing though the misguided criticism may be against me, my lungs know they can do nothing more noble than to make known that I see through the bondage of overbearing government and that I stand for true liberty. And so I once again pick up the battle, I once again raise my eyes to the tattered stars and torn stripes, and I once again prime the weapon of my words with a deep, cleansing breath.
I dare to speak truth above the crowd, lest I suffocate and die, choking on the remains of a tattered flag.