With apologies to Woody Guthrie, who remains one of my heroes, this land is not your land or my land. She was never ours to conquer, nor some sort of divine gift, bequeathed by God, for the lives brutally extinguished in the shameful, bloody mess of colonization.
You see, self-evident truths, the ones we purportedly hold firmly in our American hearts, are not so self-evident when the civilization we uphold has been built upon blood and bones on the land of ancient, already-existing peoples. Take a deep breath and read it again, without needing to get defensive. Let us first tell this mournful truth before we take a victory lap or gather to celebrate, and let us have the courage to examine these myths much deeper.
Liberty for all. It's a beautiful concept that is merely a punchline when my country, the United States of America, continues to lead the western world in mass incarcerations. This is a place of denial and a place of unspeakable violence. This is a place where traffic stops still end in far too many murders. This place, that you claim to be Holy Ground, is the place where dozens of immigrants are found dead in abandoned trucks, and where even Independence Day celebrations culminate in hysteria and death.
How can God Bless America if she oppresses her people, like she has done for centuries? An America that provides freedom for the precious few but denies the humanity of its most vulnerable citizens. We were founded in violence and denial and these things remain deeply embedded in our DNA, evident in every new story; so numerous we grow apathetic, so commonplace that very few of us seem to remember that THIS IS NOT NORMAL.
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I remember some years back, hiking on Chemehuevi and Mojave land on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. I remember feeling the sacred vibration as my feet touched the ground. I was surrounded by Ocotillo and Mariposa Lillies, the kind that grow in unforgiving climates and remain as a testament to a natural world teeming with something bigger than any human being can ponder. This Earth, this Country, is their home.
And Joshua Tree isn't unique. This land belongs to the wildflowers - the lupines and the columbines, the bluebells and the larkspurs, the poppies and the yarrows. This land belongs to the redwoods and aspens, the junipers and ponderosa pines, the descendents of even older species who hold precious secrets, who remember. This land belongs to the towering Rocky Mountains - so old we can barely fathom their millions and millions of years of existence.
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Nationalism tells us we have some God-given and sanctioned right to strip lands from the peoples who cultivated them. Nationalism says God has blessed us, in particular, and above others, because of a document forged in half-truths and dripping with exclusion and cruelty. Nationalism holds power above reverence, absolutes instead of mystery. Nationalism requires loyalty and pledges instead of honest reflection and critique and it perpetuates violence in a land already steeped in it.
If I love this land, and I do, I must care for her. If I love this country, and I do, I must love her people. If I revere freedom, I must require it for all, no exceptions.
As much as I want to believe in the Church of Woody, I cannot. This is not our land, yours or mine, but she is our home. And we have much to lament, much to make right, before I hold up the sparklers, throw the hot dogs on the grill and celebrate the myth of how chosen and star-spangled awesome we are.
