Tag Archives: Thomas Jefferson

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.

Rise Up with Words. A Declaration for Our Troubled Times.

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THEN. July 2, 1776: The Continental Congress stood up to a king and voted to declare independence.

NOW. July 2, 2025: I’m standing up to the costume drama unfolding in our Capitol—my words against their charades, my truth against their power.

ACTION NEEDED. This is the most important piece I’ve written all year.

Please read. Please share. Please TAKE A STAND.

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

—Martin Niemöller (1892–1984), Lutheran minister and former U-boat commander who became one of Hitler’s most vocal clerical critics. Imprisoned in concentration camps from 1937 to 1945, Niemöller’s words became a timeless warning against silence in the face of tyranny.

We all know that words matter. But in these politically charged times — when so many people feel hopeless, unheard, and unseen — words matter even more. Words have always been more than sound or scribble; they are lifelines—tied to truth, tossed to the drowning. They can carry us from despair to resolve, from silence to solidarity, from helplessness to empowerment. They can become the bridge that carries us across the moments when our spirit grows weak. In moments like these, words aren’t just language. They are lifeboats we cling to, rallying cries we raise, and sparks that illuminate a path forward.

I have no doubt in the world that some of you are nodding in agreement while at the same time saying to yourself:

“Yes. Words matter, but I’m not good with words, and I’m certainly not good enough with words to build a bridge from here to anywhere.”

I hear you. Loud and clear.

But here’s the good thing: In times like these, when every nerve and muscle of our being is tested, we can turn to the famous words of history—words spoken or written in moments that felt just as dark as these—and draw strength from their resonance. At a minimum, we can be uplifted toward a more hopeful place. And perhaps—just perhaps—those words can fan a flame strong enough to make us stand, to speak out, to let our voices ring forth with all the conviction and courage we can muster, even if they aren’t as eloquent or melodious as we’d like them to be.

When our hope wanes as we witness an overwhelming litany of decisions made in the highest office of our land—unleashed overnight without consulting Congress—our hearts can still swell as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Colonial Americans didn’t stay silent. They made their grievances known in the Declaration of Independence—taxation without representation, abuse of power, the erosion of rights, power wielded like a whip, the slow strangling of liberty. And they didn’t just grumble. They declared. Boldly. They named the wrongs and named their remedy: a clean break from tyranny.

When our hope wanes as we witness the word “diversity” being rebranded as dangerous, when “equity” is twisted into an accusation, and when “inclusion” is weaponized to divide, our hearts can swell as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Our Nation’s Founding Fathers, for all their inconsistencies, still struck a promise into the air—a promise capacious enough to grow. And others carried it forward, naming the vision in clearer, bolder language.

In his 1782 essay What Is an American?, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur offered a radical vision of unity through difference:

“Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

This was not a call for sameness, but for a shared becoming—a future rooted in diversity, not afraid of it.

And even earlier, in 1774, America’s first published Black poet—Phillis Wheatley—penned a letter to the Reverend Samson Occom that reads like a quiet trumpet blast.

“In every human breast,” she wrote, “God has implanted a principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression and pants for deliverance.”

And then, with the same clarity, she penned the line that shames us in today’s politically charged times:

“How well the cry for liberty, and the reverse disposition for the exercise of oppressive power over others agree—I humbly think it does not require the penetration of a philosopher to determine.”

She wasn’t just America’s first great poet of color—she was its first great poet of conscience. And her words, like Crèvecœur’s, echo louder now than the noise trying to drown them.

When our hope wanes as we witness emergency decrees, loyalty tests, and watchdog purges—all pointing to a dangerous concentration of executive power, monarchical behavior parading around in a republic’s clothing—our hearts can swell as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Our Founding Fathers didn’t fight a king just to crown another in modern garb. They resisted not just a monarch, but monarchy itself—the idea that one man’s will should outweigh the people’s voice.

In 1776, as the revolution took hold, John Adams captured the essence of the American project with unwavering clarity:

“A republic is a government of laws, not of men.”

James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 47 (1788), took the warning further:

“The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

And Thomas Paine, never one to soften the blow, wrote in Common Sense (1776):

“A king hath little more to do than to make war and give away places; which in plain terms is to impoverish the nation and set it together by the ears.”

He cut straight to the danger of one man’s whims becoming national policy. Our founders knew what unchecked power looked like. They didn’t whisper. They shouted. And like the NO KINGS protests rising across our land today, they made it plain: we were never meant to be ruled.

When our hope wanes as we witness the slow dismantling of institutional independence—over 160 officials purged from agencies like the EEOC and NLRB, watchdogs replaced with loyalists, courts straining to hold the line—our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

James Madison, in 1788, understood that power itself isn’t evil—but left unchecked, it becomes so.

“Wherever the real power in a Government lies,” he wrote, “there is the danger of oppression.”

He wasn’t warning about nameless bureaucrats—he was warning about any one person or faction gathering too much control, silencing dissent, and bypassing the balance that keeps liberty alive.

And Patrick Henry, fiery and fearless, stood on the floor of the Virginia Convention in 1775 and made no apologies for confronting tyranny:

“Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third… may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.”

Henry wasn’t inciting violence—he was demanding vigilance. He knew that loyalty to country means resisting those who betray its principles.

And now, as the Justice Department targets political opponents, journalists, legal voices, and civil society groups, we know without a doubt. This isn’t democracy defending itself. It’s power consuming dissent.

When our hope wanes as we watch protections rolled back—clean air, safe water, wild land handed over to those who see only profit—our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

From the very start, we claimed a promise—not just to ourselves, but to our posterity. That word wasn’t filler. It meant something. It still does. Climate justice is that promise in action—seen now in rising seas, poisoned wells, and forests burning faster than we can name them. When leaders silence the science and gut the safeguards, they’re not just changing direction. This isn’t a policy shift. It’s a broken covenant.

Thomas Jefferson, a farmer before he was a Founder, believed that the land was not merely a resource but a shared inheritance. He wrote in 1785:

“The earth belongs…to the living.”

But even that came late. Native nations understood long before we put pen to parchment that land is not a prize—it’s a trust. They signed treaties in good faith. We broke them.

And now? We’re breaking faith again—not just with those who came before, but with those still to come. The damage isn’t distant. It’s here. The question isn’t whether we can fix it. The question is whether we will rise and demand that our leaders honor the covenant: to preserve the land, protect the future, and remember—this earth was never ours to ruin.

When our hope wanes as we watch truth itself come under siege—journalists threatened, teachers silenced, libraries politicized—our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Thomas Jefferson, in 1787, didn’t hedge:

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Even in their disagreement, our founders understood the power of a free press not just to inform, but to guard against tyranny.

Benjamin Franklin, both printer and revolutionary, warned us plainly:

“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”

And it isn’t just the founding generation we can turn to. In 1949, Harry Truman, no stranger to press scrutiny, said:

“Once a government is committed to silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go—and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens.”

These weren’t sentimental niceties. They were warnings. We don’t need to like every headline or trust every journalist. But when we allow the press to be painted as treasonous, we’re not protecting freedom—we’re abandoning it.

When our hope wanes as we watch universities bow to political pressure—when scholars are silenced, curriculums censored, and the pursuit of knowledge reshaped to please the powerful—our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Harvard, our first university, wasn’t founded to flatter authority. It was founded in 1636 to train ministers, yes—but also to nurture thought, sharpen conscience, and elevate public understanding. In 1650, its charter affirmed that the ends of education were not just knowledge, but wisdom.

And yet now, we see calls for partisan oversight of hiring and research. Ideological litmus tests. Attempts to turn places of learning into arenas of political control. Harvard, so far, has stood its ground—but the pressure is mounting. And the lesson is not just for Harvard. At Columbia, at UVA, across campuses nationwide, faculty and students are being told to speak carefully or not at all.

Academic freedom isn’t a fringe privilege. It’s a cornerstone of democracy. John Adams, educated at Harvard, warned back in 1765:

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right… to knowledge as they have to liberty.”

He knew: take away knowledge, and liberty won’t be far behind. That’s what’s at stake now—not just tenure or textbooks, but the freedom to think without permission. A nation that punishes thinking is not preparing its future. It’s protecting the throne of a wannabe king.

When our hope wanes as we watch even the Library of Congress—the nation’s repository of truth—reduced to a partisan pawn, our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

Established in 1800, the Library of Congress was created for one reason: to serve all members of Congress, regardless of party, with nonpartisan, factual information to guide legislation and uphold the public good.

It wasn’t designed to serve the president. It wasn’t created to chase political favor. It was built to anchor democracy with facts, scholarship, and shared access to knowledge.

When Jefferson sold his personal library to rebuild the collection after the War of 1812, he wrote:

“There is, in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

That was the point: to ensure no lawmaker, from any district or ideology, would be left without the resources to govern wisely.

Today, that founding principle is under siege. Efforts to reshape the Library’s leadership along partisan lines don’t merely politicize a post—they betray the institution’s very purpose. When the branch meant to inform all of Congress begins answering to one man, we haven’t just weakened an agency. We run the risk of surrendering our intellectual compass. Library of Congress leadership—and Congress—must stand strong against the whims of power.

When our hope wanes as we watch a president bypass Congress and drop bombs in secret—our hearts can swell again as we remember: this is not who we said we would be.

James Madison, in 1795, saw the danger long before drones and bunker-busters:

“The executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it… It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”

On June 22, 2025, under the name Operation Midnight Hammer, U.S. bombers struck three Iranian nuclear facilities—Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. No congressional debate. No formal authorization. No imminent threat. Just one man, acting alone—bypassing the branch meant to check him, using our military not to defend, but to declare.

This wasn’t war by necessity. It was war by fiat—a president bypassing the branch meant to restrain him, using our military not to defend the nation, but to flex unchecked power.

And here’s what should keep us up at night: presidents no longer need troops on the ground to wage war. All it takes is air clearance, a press team to spin the story, and a public too stunned or exhausted to object. When war becomes a solo act, democracy becomes a stage—and we become the silent audience. This isn’t national security. It’s autocracy with attitude and altitude. And if we shrug it off now, we may not recognize the next war until it’s already being fought in our name—with no one left to ask for permission.

And so, to every American who feels the ground shifting beneath us—hear this:

Our liberty was not built for silence.
Our independence was not meant to sleep.
Our democracy was not handed down to be hoarded or hollowed out.

It was meant to be lived—fought for—spoken into being.

So we rise.

To take a stand against leaders who crave loyalty but abandon law.
To take a stand against forests felled and futures stolen.
To take a stand against truth trampled beneath propaganda—and the politicizing of the Library of Congress itself.
To take a stand against teachers gagged, reporters threatened, watchdogs replaced.
To take a stand against bombs dropped in secret and power seized in silence.

We rise with our voices—
not to plead, but to proclaim.
Not to whisper but to roar.

Because words are not ornaments. They are weapons—sacred ones.
They are how a free people sharpen their resolve.
They are how we mark the line: This far. No further.

We will not go quiet.
We will not stand down.
We will not forget who we said we would be.

As we honor the liberty and independence that define who we are, who we were, and who we still must become—

Let us remember, on this Fourth of July:

Take a stand with words.
They matter now more than ever.