I am not a crying man, though I once was. I could shed tears on any pretext, from a sunset to a Chick Corea composition.
Certain events, mostly of my own making, drained my tears to near dry. The details are none of your business. Since then, there have been few times I've cried, and those times have not been events of a trickling tear or two, but weeping beyond my control. The death of my cat in my arms as I crooned to her. Some stupid, self-congratulatory DJ playing "Do You Know What It Means" as we drove from Austin to Crawford after hearing that the 17th Street Canal floodwalls had failed and my city was doomed to drown.
My tears don't come cheap as they did once. They don't come often.
Tonight, I watched HBO's production of the story of John Adams, his wife and our beginnings. I was very impressed by the performances of Paul Giamatti, Laura Linney, et. al. But one actor, nearly an extra, reciting his one precious line, broke the dam of my eyes.
He played a wounded Massachusetts militiaman, taking a drink of water from Mrs. Adams as he retired from Boston. He gave her the news that the British had killed nearly 400 in the firing on Bunker Hill, but that the militia had held.
Seeing that man and hearing his report, I began to sob. GF, also crying, took my hand. I was able to get out a sentence: "I love this country."
So many times I've dreamed of a better life to be made elsewhere--British Columbia, Ireland, Southern France. But I've never taken the idea that seriously. Because this is my country, bought for me by a long line of men and women who paid with, in Mr. Jefferson's words, their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor, down to my father, a young ensign out of accelerated officer training who spent his innocence and likely his sanity on the bridge of a creaking LST off the coast of Manila.
These people paid whatever price they were told was required to keep the claim made by Messrs. Jefferson, Adams and Franklin in that sticky summer in Philadelphia. My paltry shoe leather, $25 campaign donations, lame letters to the editor, protestations to my congressional representatives and brief tumbles down the Recent Diaries list are nothing in comparison to the coin they offered.
But I am proud to pay that, and whatever else will be asked.
Because this is my country. It doesn't belong to Jesus, China, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Dubai, the Carlyle Group or the DLC. I believe in the promise made in the Declaration, the compact entered in the Constitution, the vision of a republic of laws not men, where all are endowed with certain, unalienable rights.
I know why 400 died on that hill, and I will not throw their sacrifice away.