When this
paper carried a column last week titled ‘T is for tea party’ I had every reason
to believe it was for the 4th of July. It wasn't.
It would be
a good way, I thought, to commemorate how the American patriots divested 3
British ships of their cargo of tea and dumped the contents into the sea on a
pearly night at Boston harbor on 16 December 1773. Three years later 13
American states declared their independence from the British on 4th
of July 1776.
But except
for the enthusiasm of my Allied students in the literature class who have opted
for American Studies, there hardly seemed any fanfare over the event. Still, several
YouTube videos perform ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ – the American national
anthem -- and sites like www.history.com can take you where you want to be.
To be fair
we are also following the fortunes of Edward Snowden. But history is about the
past. Snowden is now. It is tempting to castigate the US for all the ills in
the world; it is another thing to try to understand its past. Here is a people
who shook off their colonial yoke and realized their yearning to be free. Through
their writers and poets they articulated a new nation. ‘The United States
themselves are essentially the greatest poem,’ said Walt Whitman.
When we look
at the 50 states that make up the US we are drawn to the individual and
particular imperatives of people as human beings. We identify with the travails
of a housewife in Connecticut, or sympathize with the victims of those targeted
at the Boston marathon. When we speak of the US as a whole we usually imply US
foreign policy – which could be very different from what the man or woman in
Oklahoma thinks.
All over the
world brave people are doing their bit to make a difference. When slide ruler
Rachelle Van Zanten from British Columbia sings ‘Down to California’ in her
sexy Texas drawl, the yearning for the land is felt by all. When she sings of
the contaminated water in Alaska we remember our wells in the inner reaches of
South Goa laid waste by mining.
The American
Civil War (1861-65) between the Northern and the Southern states established
the fact that America – at least that part of it led by Abraham Lincoln – was
willing to abolish slavery. Black poets like Langston Hughes contested the fact
that civil rights were respected. It
took a Martin Luther King Jr. to rock America with his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech
in 1963. Both Lincoln and Luther King rose above themselves to strive for a
better world.
In the
recent ForbesLife India June edition
Uday Benegal waxes eloquent on Woodstock 1969 in New York and how music –
American music – provided the sound track for revolutions. Americans have
always mobilized to keep USA as ‘the land of the free and home of the brave.’
Let’s hand it to them.
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Published in Gomantak Times Weekender on 14 July 2013. Pix of facsimile of Whitman's poem 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd' written on the death of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 from http://edwardbyrne.blogspot.in/2009/02/abraham-lincoln-walt-whitman-and.html
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