Tag Archives: Civic Responsibility

The Solitary Flag

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“The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.” —Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). Principal author of the Declaration of Independence and third President of the United States.

At the far end of the deck, beyond the flowers and conversation, the flag flew. The mountain breeze caught it softly, lifting and releasing it against the deep green of the forest. There was something almost reverential about its solitude.

Time was it would have had company. A flag flying on the opposite end. Two in the middle. And spanning the entire 70-foot deck, bunting—the classic pleated red, white, and blue fanned ones that unfurl patriotism, national unity, and civic belonging.

After all, this time was different. It was special. It was unlike any Fourth of July that has come before. We were not simply marking another birthday. We were celebrating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Two hundred and fifty years. It is an astonishing span of time, and I suspect most Americans, if they paused to think about it at all, felt at least a quiet sense of gratitude for having lived to witness such an anniversary.

I did.

Ordinarily, I would have looked for something even bolder than bunting and traditional flags to mark the occasion. After all, I enjoy celebrations of almost every kind. Give me the first tomato from the garden, a birthday, an anniversary, a hummingbird’s return, a friend’s good fortune, or even a pie that slices perfectly, and I can usually find a reason to raise a glass or gather people around the table. Celebration comes naturally to me.

This year, however, I couldn’t muster up more than one solitary flag flying in the northeast corner of our deck. Somehow that seemed enough.

If you are tempted to think that I’m less than patriotic, you would be mistaken. I love this country deeply. My family has lived on this soil for generations. Some of my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Others answered their country’s call in wars that followed. Their sacrifices are woven into my family’s story, just as surely as they are woven into the story of our nation.

Perhaps that’s why I found myself standing on the deck, looking toward the flag, wondering why my heart felt quieter than usual.

The answer, I think, had been unfolding for days.

It had not been building toward any single event. Iran and the United States had exchanged military strikes, then edged toward a ceasefire. Venezuela’s government and Washington were trading threats over what might come next. Russia’s war in Ukraine ground on into another season, no closer to resolution than it had been the season before. And closer to home, even Greenland—a name I never expected to hear in a conversation about American power—had become a subject of dispute over sovereignty and strategic interest. Not all of these were wars in the traditional sense. But each was a test of what a nation is willing to risk, and what it is willing to say out loud that it wants.

What surprised me was not the speed of events.

It was the speed with which many of us seemed to move on.

I searched and listened for conversations at stores and among friends. I expected arguments. I expected anxiety. I expected outrage or relief—something to suggest that Americans were wrestling with the gravity of what had happened and were asking the tough questions.

Had military action become the only option? Were the stated objectives achieved? What might the long-term consequences be—for everyone involved?

Why weren’t more of us asking those questions?

Instead, I encountered what felt like an extraordinary calm.

Life simply continued. People packed restaurants. Families headed to the beach. Neighbors mowed their lawns. Social media filled with photographs of backyard cookouts, grandchildren chasing sparklers, fresh peaches, birthday cakes, and sunsets.

I smiled at many of those photographs. Some of them were my own, on Facebook.

Gary and I watered flowers. Ruby ran around the yard. We welcomed Gary’s daughter and her family into our home.

We did all those things and more. Life, after all, does not suspend itself because the world has become uncertain.

Yet a question continued to follow me from room to room.

When did war become something we simply live around?

I found myself looking for the national conversation I remembered from years ago. Not agreement. We have never agreed about war. During the Cold War, neighbors disagreed about nuclear weapons and foreign policy. During Vietnam, families argued around dinner tables. After September 11, Americans wrestled with difficult questions about security and liberty. The conversations were often messy, sometimes angry, but they happened.

But here’s why I’m uneasy now.

I grew up in a world where war mattered, not because I fought in one. I didn’t. But because nearly everyone around me had been touched by one.

As a boy growing up in the coal camps of southern West Virginia, I knew men whose lives had been interrupted by World War II. Others had served in Korea. They did not often tell long stories, but they didn’t have to. Sometimes a single sentence carried the weight of an entire lifetime. Sometimes it was a photograph on the mantel. Sometimes a missing friend whose name was spoken only once each Memorial Day.

War was never merely an item in the newspaper. It lived among us. We didn’t live around it. There is a difference.

We are, after all, a nation born in revolution. Our earliest history is inseparable from war—not because Americans glorified it, but because they believed certain principles were worth extraordinary sacrifice. Life. Liberty. The pursuit of happiness. Those words were never meant to make war ordinary. If anything, they remind us that the decision to wage war should never become ordinary.

Human beings were never designed to carry the weight of every tragedy occurring on every continent every hour of every day. We still have gardens to tend, meals to prepare, dogs to walk, children to raise, aging parents to love, and neighbors who need us.

Even after the wars I’ve known had ended, the possibility of another one lingered in the background of everyday life. My generation practiced air-raid drills in school. We learned unfamiliar words like “fallout” and “radiation” before we fully understood them. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, adults spoke in quieter voices, and children sensed enough to know that the world itself seemed less certain than it had the week before.

I suppose every generation grows accustomed to the anxieties of its own time.

Perhaps ours has simply grown accustomed to too many.

Pandemics.

Political divisions.

Economic uncertainties.

Iran. Venezuela. Ukraine. Greenland. Names that, a few years ago, would each have commanded a nation’s full attention for weeks. Now they arrive almost in the same breath, take their turn in the headlines, and give way to whatever comes next.

The headlines arrive with urgency, remain for a few days, and then quietly slide aside to make room for the next emergency waiting in line.

That is not entirely our fault. Life insists upon being lived.

And yet…

Conflict—and especially the prospect of war—ought to interrupt us.

It ought to remind us that somewhere a young American is standing watch far from home. Somewhere parents are waiting for a telephone call they hope never comes. Somewhere families in Iran, or Kyiv, or towns whose names we’re only now learning, are wondering whether tomorrow will resemble yesterday or whether everything familiar will disappear before morning.

Distance may explain why we do not feel their fear. However, it should not excuse forgetting it.

I have no grand solutions to offer. I cannot tell diplomats how to negotiate or generals how to wage war. I have lived long enough to distrust simple answers to complicated questions.

What I do know is this.

A nation that celebrates its freedom should never grow so accustomed to conflict, wherever it appears and whatever name it goes by, that it no longer pauses to consider what such conflict asks of everyone it touches.

On the morning of the Fourth of July, I stepped onto our deck and looked toward the flag flying quietly in the northeast corner. It moved gently in the mountain breeze, exactly as it had moved the day before and the day before that.

I realized then that I hadn’t celebrated less because I loved my country less. I simply chose to celebrate more quietly because I found myself loving my country differently.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” That pledge was never only a declaration of independence. It was an invitation to keep asking, generation after generation, what independence should cost us and what it should demand of us.

That solitary flag in the corner of the deck was never a sign that I loved my country less.

It was a reminder that some anniversaries call not only for celebration, but for an honest reckoning with who we are, what we stand for, and what kind of nation we hope to become.

Never in My Lifetime. Why This Moment in the American Presidency Is Different.

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“If you see something that is not right, you have a moral obligation to say something.”
—John Lewis (1940–2020). Civil Rights leader and U.S. Congressman.

Ebenezer Scrooge I am not.

Ask anyone. Ask everyone. I’ll wager you won’t find a soul who has ever called me stingy, sour, or mean-spirited.

Yet, this holiday season, I’ve felt a bit of a Bah, Humbug mood creeping in, not about Christmas or the lights or the joy around me, but about something else entirely. It’s something heavier. It’s something I didn’t expect to feel at seventy-eight.

So make yourself a cup of coffee, tea, or hot chocolate, and pull up a chair beside me. Let me tell you what’s stirring.

It begins, I suppose, with the one clear advantage that comes with age: hindsight.

Last month, I turned seventy-eight. Candidly, I’ve been looking back at the past decades a lot this year, not from a personal angle, but a political one.

I’ve lived through a lot, and I have a vantage point that people younger than I simply don’t.

I grew up in the shadow of McCarthyism (the early 1950s), when suspicion was a national pastime.

I remember the shock of four assassinations—JFK in ’63, Malcolm X in ’65, and both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy in ’68.

I watched the Civil Rights movement reshape the country through the 1950s and 60s.

I lived through the long, grinding years of Vietnam (1955–1975) and the protests that defined a generation.

I witnessed the unraveling of trust during Watergate (1972–74).

I saw Reagan confront the final act of the Cold War in the 1980s.

I watched America enter Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, wars that stretched from 2001 to 2021.

I’ve felt the impact of multiple economic crashes—1973, 1987, 2000, 2008.

And I lived through the Obama years (2009–2016), a hopeful presidency during a time when the country’s political divides were hardening in ways none of us fully saw coming.

Looking back across all the turmoil, the marches, the reckonings, the wars, and the scandals, I’ve realized something I didn’t expect. Our protests have always had a focus: an issue, a cause, a policy, a war. They rose up around ideas that divided us or injustices that demanded attention. Even the most explosive chapters of my lifetime had a center of gravity that wasn’t a single person but the larger forces shaping the country.

But what we’re witnessing now feels different. In fact, it is different. In nearly eight decades of watching this nation rise, fracture, heal, and reinvent itself, I’ve never seen sustained nationwide protests aimed not at a policy or a war, but at a president himself. The center of gravity has shifted. The outrage isn’t about an issue—it’s about the individual. It’s about the president.

Don’t get me wrong: we’re still seeing the familiar issue-driven protests that have always been part of American life. People are marching about immigration policy, climate change, book bans, economic strains, reproductive rights, and a dozen other concerns that flare and fade as the political winds shift. That part hasn’t changed.

What has changed—what stands apart from every era I’ve lived through—is the scale and persistence of the protests aimed not at a policy but at the president himself. The “No Kings” movement isn’t fighting over legislation; it’s rejecting the idea of one man placing himself above the laws that govern the rest of us. And in my lifetime, that is unprecedented.

The protests I’m talking about aren’t the usual disagreements over taxes, foreign policy, or legislation. They’re about the president’s conduct, his rhetoric, his legal troubles, and the fear—spoken openly now—that democratic norms cannot hold under his influence. People are marching about character, about fitness, about the very idea of what the presidency should represent. That’s new. In my lifetime, no president has drawn this kind of personal, sustained, multi-city repudiation simply by virtue of who he is.

It matters because when protests shift from policies to personalities, the stakes change. Policies can be debated, amended, reversed; they live in the realm of argument. But when millions of people focus their alarm on a single leader—on temperament, on truthfulness, on respect for institutions—that signals a deeper fracture. It means the country is no longer arguing about what we should do, but about who we are willing to trust with power. I’ve never seen that question asked so loudly, or by so many, in the streets.

I’ve seen my share of turbulence. I’ve watched this country reinvent itself more than once. But this moment feels distinct, and I find myself wanting to name it before history reframes it for us. Not to alarm, but to observe. Not to predict, but to remember. For all my years watching this country rise and falter, I’ve never seen a presidency provoke this kind of personal outcry. Saying so feels like the least a witness can do.

Maybe that’s the real value of hindsight. It’s the quiet ability to say, “This is new,” without shouting and without shrinking from it. I don’t claim special wisdom, but I do claim a long view. From that view, this moment stands out.

If this moment truly is different—and it is—then it cannot be met with habits borrowed from easier times. Recognizing what is new is not enough. Witness alone does not stabilize a democracy. A moment like this places demands on those who live through it, not as spectators, but as citizens. It asks more than opinion and more than outrage. It asks for conduct.

This moment requires attention that is disciplined rather than entertained. It requires tracking what actually changes—laws altered, norms broken, power consolidated—instead of reacting to spectacle. It requires noticing patterns rather than isolated scandals and refusing to look away simply because we are tired. Exhaustion is not neutral; it benefits whoever gains from our distraction. Paying attention is labor, and right now that labor is necessary.

This moment requires honesty that refuses euphemism. It requires naming corruption as corruption, authoritarian behavior as authoritarian, and cruelty as cruelty, even when doing so makes conversations uncomfortable or costly. It requires resisting the urge to soften language so others can remain disengaged. It also requires self-examination, asking whether silence, politeness, or a desire to avoid conflict has quietly become moral retreat. Democracies do not fail only because of liars; they fail when too many people choose comfort over truth.

This moment requires steadiness that is grounded in self-command rather than denial. It requires rejecting panic, resisting despair, and refusing the addictive churn of outrage that leaves nothing behind but fatigue. It requires consistency—staying informed when the news is grim, voting every time, and continuing to show up after the drama fades and only responsibility remains. Strongmen thrive on chaos. Steady citizens deprive them of that advantage.

This moment requires participation that goes beyond holding opinions. It requires voting in every election and helping others do the same. It requires supporting institutions under pressure—courts, schools, libraries, journalists, and election workers—because they slow the abuse of power and protect the rule of law. It requires showing up locally, where power is quieter but more reachable, and where absence carries consequences. Democracy is not sustained by commentary alone; it is sustained by persistent, ordinary involvement.

This moment requires refusal to normalize what would once have shocked us. It requires refusal to excuse behavior simply because it has become familiar and refusal to accept that “this is just how things are now.” It requires refusing to let fatigue become permission. Refusal is not negativity; it is boundary-setting. Democracies collapse when citizens gradually accept what they should never have agreed to tolerate, and refusal is how those lines are held.

Whatever comes next, I’ll keep trusting the clarity that age has sharpened rather than dulled. Though the season might tempt me to climb the nearest chimney and holler Bah, Humbug into the cold mountain air, I won’t. Scrooge may have needed three ghosts to find his hope again, but I’ve lived long enough to know where mine comes from. It comes from the stubborn resilience of ordinary people. Like you. Like me.

Even now—especially now—I choose to believe in our power to bend this country toward something better. We’ve done it before. Whether we do it again will depend on what we’re willing to notice, to protect, and to refuse.