George Beres: A July 4th to Lament What's Happened to Our Country

George Beres, in a piece sent to HNN (7-1-05):

[George Beres, retired in Eugene, Ore., is a first-generation American whose parents migrated here from Greece in search of greater freedom and truer independence.]

Born in 1933, I've lived almost one-third the life of my nation, born in 1776. In those spans, much has evolved-- but probably nothing more than in our gradual slide away from national integrity as we celebrate our country's birthday.

As a boy, I did what was natural for kids of the 1930s and 1940s. We celebrated the 4th of July with explosiveness. Sounds of firecrackers and whistling bombs often began the night before. They started howls of fear in neighborhood canines who thought things were going-- well, to the dogs.

Then government regulation placed limits on sale of fireworks that too often left a child burned.

At our place in the middle of Illinois, Dad worked the holiday, selling what then were legal fireworks at his candy store downtown. As dusk set in, he finally got home, arms loaded with unsold fireworks. What excitement for us and for the neighbor kids who came to expect our yard to be aglow with sparklers, pinwheels, multi-colored flares and Roman Candles, while strings of firecrackers exploded around them.

As years passed, the joy of those holiday sounds morphed into a frightening new identity, terrible screams of war: the 2d World War, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait and Iraq. First it was radio that brought frightening sounds to our ears. For the children of my sons' generation, war was made vivid by TV.

The blessing of living in the United States-- buffered by two protective

oceans-- never was more pronounced than when we heard on the radio and saw in movies and on TV the horrors of far-away war. They gave us nightmares.

But we always awoke in the calm security of an unthreatened home. The children of Europe and Asia awoke-- if they awoke-- to another day of uncertain survival as guns of war blasted around them.

We assumed wars were forced on us by the need to survive. With time, some of us learned that wasn't always true, as with war with Mexico and that with Spain. History books camouflaged them with the phrase, "manifest destiny," a hunger for expansion. Reading between the lines, one might recognize that wars of expansion brought us stolen goods, Texas and the Philippines, even though our history books occasionaly mislead by describing unheroic acts in heroic terms.

In Iraq, the "spirit of '76" and honorable goals of one George--

Washington-- became tarnished by despotic ones of another George, the second Bush. Iraq bleeds our children and the people of Iraq, and causes our national integrity to hemorrhage.

Forty years ago we were mired in an unjust war of our choosing in Viet Nam until Daniel Ellsberg revealed the Pentagon Papers that helped bring an end to that unncessary conflict.

That parallels what we find today in the Downing Street Report. That fully corroborated British Intelligence memo makes it clear President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair agreed to lie about need for war in Iraq.

They lied about non-existent threats-- Iraq's invisible stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and the fiction of Saddam Hussein collaborating with Osama Bin Laden on 9-11.

Those untruths created national anger and hunger for revenge that allowed the folly of a preemptive attack on Iraq. Even today, as we muse over forgotten meanings of the 4th of July, some Americans still find it hard to accept the reality our leaders, once considered good guys, sometimes could be bad guys.

It's time we got over that psychological denial.

The sounds of Independence Day in my youth became muted when essential safety measures diminished some of the holiday flash. Yet origins of our national birthday still were remembered so we could honor sacrifices of those who led us out from under rule of tyrants.

Today, our leaders waste the blood of our children, but sacrifice nothing of themselves as they seek to rule others. It's time for us to remember what it was that once gave our nation's birthday meaning.