Last night, we saw an old rerun on TV that upset me a bit. It was a Drew Carey
episode in which he and Mr. Wick are pretending to be a gay married couple (their
words) in order to get a Wick a visa to stay in the US. I wonder how many people,
watching that show, believed that those really are the laws. It upset me, because
if people believe that, if they don't know when things are wrong, then there will
never be any outcry to fix the laws. I was thinking about that again today, after
coming across some lines by Henry van Dyke:
I know that Europe's wonderful, yet something seems to lack:
The Past is too much with her, and the people looking back.
But the glory of the Present is to make the Future free, --
We love our land for what she is and what she is to be.
Van Dyke wrote that in 1911, before the Great War shattered Europe, and forever
wrenched her from her past, but I still believe that if there is something that
America ought to be, it's encapsulated in those last two lines. Australia, too;
the two countries are alike in that. I felt at home there because both countries
are so oriented toward the promise of the future.
Incidentally, Roger McGuinn put that poem to music, and it can be heard href="http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden/America.html">here.
I don't know why I felt the need to write that today, except for the concatenation
of the sitcom and the poem. But it is something I believe in.