It did not occur to me until just this morning that our national anthem ends with a question. Does that not seem a little odd? “…does that star spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” I know from the context of the poem that the question is about the location of the flag, but let us cherry pick for a moment if we may. It works in scriptural analysis, so why not in literary criticism? What if the question is about the land over which the flag flies?
Are we the land of the free and the home of the brave? The answer, it seems to me, has always been “Not yet, but we are willing to learn.” Certainly this was true at the outset. The guys who founded the country had an idea about freedom, but they had no clue how far that idea would get taken even in their lifetimes. And we went in kind of strange directions around 1860 or so. Standing on the edge of 2010, it’s amazing to see how much freer, and I hope braver, we have gotten since 1910 (i.e. universal sufferage).
Do we have miles to go? Of course. But there is no denying that the experiment we are still engaged in here in America may still be what Abraham Lincoln called “the last best hope of Earth.”