"Flags, Free Thought, and Fanatics:
Where Are We After September 11?"
by Rev. Kimi Riegel
September 15, 2002

Reading : Let America be America again (Langston Hughes)

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed –
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek –
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean –
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today – O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home –
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay –
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again –
The land that never has been yet –
And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine – the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME –
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose –
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America !

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath –
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain –
All, all the stretch of these great green states –
And make America again!

Sermon: Flags, Free Thought and Fanatics

Ours is a great country, a beautiful country, a country rich with resources of people and material goods, a country with tremendous idealism and potential. Last year a terrible thing happened within the boundaries of what we call our country. An unspeakable thing, a thing so awful it still defies our comprehension. And yet. And yet. Do we need to surrender ourselves to blind trust as it has been called in “Mother Jones” magazine?[1] Do we need to simply forget the voices of hope and peace and go with raw emotion? Do we need to listen only to the people we like to hear? Do we need to stop questioning and asking for information? Or do we need to allow this event to create the struggle of paradox, the struggle of listening to many voices, the struggle of a complicated view of the world and our country, the struggle to define universal human experience and what it means to be patriotic?

Just a quick side note on the sources of my sermons. I will frequently mention the name of someone or some source. Sometimes these people are colleagues (and I will tell you when) and more often they are writers I have come across in my reading. Sometimes I don’t know these people and haven’t a clue about who they are or what else they have said but I want to give credit where it is due. Still it weighs down a sermon to stop and give each person’s credentials when I am on an emotional rampage – like this sermon will lend itself to. So, I don’t usually say more than the name. But please don’t think I am just dropping names that you should know. Most likely they were strangers to me before I started this sermon. If you want more details than just the names, please pick up the printed version of the sermon or go on line where it will be footnoted and details given. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

The patriotic zeal that has gripped this nation frightens me. It frightens me because it seems to have limited what we say and what we hear. The events and emotions of September 11, 2001 have been transformed into a suspicious watchfulness, a denial of freedoms, a distrust of those that question, a heightened level of anxiety and a general blindness to the everyday real struggles of people in this country and others. Did you know that in Sri Lanka more than 3,000 people die each year as a result of their ethnic conflict? That conflict has been going on for 20 years – 64,000 lives have been lost– far more even than in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. And yet we are the world’s victims. We are the ones that have been wronged. We are the ones that have suffered the greatest losses. I heard one radio personality describe the national feeling as “our righteous anger” and the need to hang on to it. We are being asked to view this event in one light and one light only – America is sinless and has been harmed and now no matter the cost, we must have revenge.

In my sermon from last fall I wrote of three voices, that Rebecca Parker[2] asks us, in any tragedy, to listen to; the voices of sorrow and grief, anger and protest and hope and trust. Last year I wrote:

“The voices of sorrow and grief are deafening. I fear there are many losses yet to come. … We hear our leaders offer words of war, unforgiving hate filled words that feel out of control. [In addition to the lives that have been lost] we have lost reason as we are consumed by the intense emotions of overwhelming pain. I plead with the universe that these feelings will give way in time to rational understanding and considered action.

These voices of pain feed the voices of anger and protest, which are becoming thunderous as well. It was an unspeakable, horrible act. There is no excuse or reason that will calm my utter fury at those who would do such a thing. Every cell of my being protests such acts of hopelessness. Theirs is a world that is so devoid of hope it leads to acts that lack comprehension, acts that are antithetical to life. We must learn to listen to these feelings of anger and protest. We must learn to listen to the fear and desperation of our own people in the face of these acts. We feel the anger ourselves.

But like the voices of sorrow, the voices of anger must not be allowed to overshadow our love and trust in humanity. The voices of reason, hope and the strength of the human spirit must be allowed to rise as well. We must not allow the hatred to feed more hatred. The anger is real but it is a secondary emotion brought on by feelings of powerlessness and sadness. At every opportunity we must listen carefully to and magnify the voices of hope and trust. The voice of life must be heard. … There are so many selfless people who let the tragedy strengthen their resolve to make the world a better place. The stories are touching of people reaching out to one another. Tears come to me as I hear of the flocks of people who have given of their lives so others could survive. “We have to do something,” is the common refrain heard around the country. Many people told me stories of reaching out to loved ones and long lost friends. In the face of such death and loss we create connections to life. We have to do something because life is relentless. It calls to us even amid the deviation and horror. The flowers will grow through pavement, the people of New York will come back, and the nation will recover. Life is unstoppable. If we help to hold up these voices of trust and love, peace will triumph. I have faith!

What a confusing time it was so filled with raw emotion. And for me, to a large extent, it remains a complex event that is hard to grasp. I remember that I hoped desperately “that our love is stronger than our grief, that the path of peace is still to be chosen over retaliation.”[3]

But each day, since that day, the radio and television are filled with stories designed to keep our interest, remind us of the pain, and rally us in support of our leaders. The voices of hope and trust have all but been lost. The hurt and angry feelings have prevailed and called our nation to a place of mistrust and continued raw emotion. Anger and anxiety rule the day. Our emotions have become pawns in the sport of retaliation. We are even reminded that we must not question the actions of government in such a time as this.[4] There is only one set of voices we are asked to hear. I heard many people on Wednesday talk of not turning on the television or radio. We are tired of the sensationalism and our nerves are raw; we wonder whether we are unsympathetic or simply unpatriotic. Rather than deepening our compassion for the world and those that suffer, it has closed our borders, or hearts and our minds.

We asked the world to rally around us and help with the tragedy. We asked countries around the world to think beyond their borders and help us to find the criminals and bring them to justice. A new collective spirit could have been born in that time. A kind of universalism of human experience could have been the rallying cry of the world. We could have furthered our sense of being “world citizens.” We could, as Martha Nussbaum suggests in her article “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” have promoted the value of justice for all humans.[5] The events could have brought a stronger world resolve for justice and peace. It could have called us to examine our lives and way of being in the world, coming closer to those constitutional values we espouse.

Instead we have used it promote the American way of life. We have used the fear and anger to promote our way as the one true way. We have used the fear and anger to justify secrecy and loss of freedoms. Perhaps most upsetting, we have become, as Sisila Bok writes, “moral hypocrites who only use the language of universality.”[6] And even that universality is as seen from our eyes only.

Instead of a growth producing, life enhancing path of examination and articulation of what it means to be a strong nation in this world we have settled for telling the world how it will be. The way our government does things is the right and only way. The way our woman and children live is the right and only way. The way we conduct our lives and business is the right and only way. Well we have seen that last one go up in smoke, but here too, in the area of the business tragedies, we have seen denial and secrecy prevail. Judith Butler writes, “That is not to say there ought to be no reference to the universal or that it has become for us an impossibility. … All that means is that there are cultural conditions for its articulation.”[7]

We need to allow this event to generate the struggle of articulating the universal and what it means to be patriotic. It’s a paradox. And oh you know how ministers love those. The paradox is that without including all the particular voices we will not be able to define the universal human experiences and without an understanding of the universality of all human experiences the particular voices are lost and unimportant.

We need the particular to get to the universal. We need to hear the voices of pain and suffering of all the people and not forget. We need to listen to draw us closer to the experiences of others. We need to listen to the Iraqis, the Palestinians, the Catholic Priests, the ENRON executives, the people who have lost loved ones, the firefighters and yes even the President. It is in the particular experiences of each of us that we come to the universal experiences that will be the redemption of September 11.

And the other side of the paradox – the universal as we have and will define it -- will never be universal because of the particular. Our experience of pain and suffering is not exactly like others. Our way of living is not necessarily the best for all. We need to allow this event to create the struggle of this paradox, the struggle of listening to many voices, and creating a universal human voice.

Thursday night my husband Alex and I, went to hear the Detroit Symphony. The concert began with the Star Spangled Banner. Everyone stood. We stood, but not without reservation. I don’t want anyone to think I don’t feel and believe this is a great nation. But I also don’t want anyone to think I support all its actions or that I relate to the type of patriotism that is being called ours. I stood, Alex stood, but not without ambivalence and mixed emotion. It’s complex. It’s messy. And it’s not easy.

But Unitarian Universalists are used to life that way. We are good at the messy, the gray and the complex. We can lead the way. We can lead the way to listening to many voices. It is well past time to listen to the voices of hope and trust. It is well past time to speak of hope and trust. Trust in the value of reflection and information. Trust in the human spirit. Trust in our common human experience in all its diversity. Trust in our guts. If what we are hearing sounds too simplistic, if we feel mixed emotions and ambivalent feelings, we need to listen to those voices and call it as we see it. May we as Unitarian Universalists who believe in freedom, reason and tolerance listen and offer our voices, even when it’s hard, even when we may sound unpatriotic. May we join the voices of Woody Guthrie and Langston Hughes and struggle to make America what it wants to be, what it can be, in the complex, messy, paradox. May we help this country to wholeness. Namaste, Amen, Blessed be, Shalom.