Mike

Ball

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June 30, 2008

This Land Is Our Land

There is something I get to do on the Fourth of July that is even more fun than all the Ballpark Franks that will be ritually sacrificed to charcoal flames in our nation’s parks and beaches and backyards. More fun than the bottle rockets that will set fire to many of our nation’s finest picnic table umbrellas and halter tops. Even more fun than all the beer that will anesthetize the sunburned bellies of our nation’s countless middle-aged revelers.

For about an hour on the Fourth of July, I get to “be” Woody Guthrie at our local library’s “We The People” program. This is a celebration of some of the great patriots in American history, of the words and ideas they used to change the world forever. I get to sit with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. I’ll sing about riding my pony in the Oklahoma hills, and I’ll sing about how this land was made for you and me.

I love it that Woody gets invited to this gathering, because when he was alive some of the people who were sitting at the top of this country’s political heap were not all that fond of him.

You see, Woody Guthrie spent a big chunk of his life traveling around America during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, some of the hardest financial times Americans have ever endured. He sang to and about the millions of people who were struggling just to keep their families from starving to death while living in the richest nation on the planet. A lot of his songs talked about the greed and hypocrisy that made it possible for something like that to happen.

As you might imagine, this did not always sit well with everybody – especially the greedy hypocrites. They labeled him a traitor and anti-American. They threatened him. They harassed him. And when he went ahead and wrote songs about that, they blacklisted him.

One of Woody’s best loved songs, and one that I’ll be privileged to sing on the Fourth of July, is “This Land is Your Land.” In case you were raised on one of the moons of Jupiter and are thus unfamiliar with this song, it glories in the majesty of America:

This land is your land, This land is my land

From California to the New York island;

From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters

This land was made for you and Me.

And it goes on that way with some of the most stirringly patriotic lyrics ever written. But most people are not so familiar with last two verses Woody wrote for this song, because they rarely get played:

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,

By the relief office I seen my people;

As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking

Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,

As I go walking that freedom highway;

Nobody living can ever make me turn back

This land was made for you and me.

You see, some folks aren’t comfortable with those verses, because they suggest that “this land” might in some way be less than perfect. It seems that these people define “patriotism” as obeying, without ever thinking or criticizing, the nation’s rulers. In the 1960s they even coined and believed in the phrase, “My country, right or wrong.”

Some of these people think a “rabble rouser” like Woody Guthrie doesn’t really belong in a lineup of great American patriots.

But I say that’s exactly where he belongs. If men like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin had subscribed to the “My country, right or wrong” idea, we would all still be eating fish and chips, calling our elevators “lifts,” and have some clue as to what a “crumpet” is.

To me real patriots are people who see that something in the land they love is not right, and are willing to devote their lives to changing it. Maybe they do it by writing a Declaration of Independence and fighting a desperate revolutionary war against the most powerful empire on Earth. Maybe they put on the uniform of our country’s armed forces and lay down their lives to defend her.

And maybe they sing songs about freedom of speech, or human rights, or the need for unions to stand up for workers against the forces of greed and corruption – because this land really was made for you and me.

Copyright © 2008, Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.