Responsibility: The Missing Half of the American Experiment

This piece is part of Yellow Scene Magazine’s Opinion section. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent a reported news position. At Yellow Scene, opinion pieces speak freely, challenge assumptions, and say the quiet parts out loud.

“Fucking Commies!”

This celebratory Fourth of July phrase appeared recently on our town’s Facebook group page. It was, I believe, a reaction to a post reminding residents of the extreme fire danger posed by high winds, dry grass, and searing heat.

Another local resident offered a similarly ballistic diatribe over fireworks restrictions, grunting cathartically about the “tyranny” of past COVID-19 protocols. To both writers, public safety measures clearly represented an existential affront to the guarantees of freedom explicit in our founding documents (and sports bars everywhere).

This hyper-partisan rhetoric trickles from the top. During a past holiday speech at Mount Rushmore, Donald Trump drifted far off script. As The New York Times reported, he “read from an apocalyptic script as the stony faces of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Lincoln looked on. He said the word ‘communism’ so many times, you might’ve thought the Cold War was still on.” To him and his followers, opponents are not just political rivals; they are “godless” and “evil.”

Fucking Commies.

Across the street, my invariably pleasant neighbors have a massive “FREEDOM” banner staked into a yard ringed with American flags. Up and down most American streets, flags fly and fireworks explode—damn the risks, and God Bless America.

Ambivalence and an Experiment

At a moment when our democratic republic seems most fragile—if not already irreparably shattered—I found myself scanning my mind and heart this holiday to find a reason to feel celebratory or proud.

As to “celebratory,” my family and I certainly enjoy freedom’s fruits; our privileges and opportunities are manifest. But as to “proud”? Not so much. I’ve always found “Proud to be an American” an odd claim. Most of us did precious little to achieve it. We are lucky, plain and simple.

My grandparents emigrated from Sweden and Holland. While they were hardly escaping tyranny, they found their small slice of the American dream and built a solid foundation for my parents, who in turn made my life possible. I feel genuine gratitude for this good fortune. The American experiment, as promised in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution, allowed this multi-generational flourishing.

Yet, one cannot celebrate such good fortune without noting the nation’s original sin: slavery. White folks’ freedoms grew expansively from generation to generation because its roots were planted in that same stolen soil, while Black women and men have realized only a halting, incomplete freedom.

This holiday ambivalence led me to a spontaneous experiment. I searched a digital text of the entire Declaration of Independence for the word responsible or responsibility. The search yielded “no result.”

Curiosity piqued, I pasted the United States Constitution into a document and repeated the search. Again: “no result.” I don’t claim a rush of historical originality, but it is an analysis I have never encountered. And I think it matters deeply.

The Perversion of Freedom

Our nation came to be through fighting oppression and escaping tyranny. In 1776, the declaration of freedom meant something entirely different than it does today. We have luxuriated in that freedom for most of our existence. Now, the word has been twisted and perverted, stripped of any collective meaning.

In the examples on my timeline—the fireworks-obsessed neighbor or Trump’s apocalyptic rhetoric—”freedom” has degenerated into a petulant cry: “I can do what I want, dammit.”

Our founding documents would have been infinitely more elegant and prescient had they paired our freedoms with our responsibilities. Responsibility provides the moral tether that holds raw freedom at bay, ensuring that one person’s liberty does not become another person’s burden. While this notion is occasionally honored in First Amendment jurisprudence—the classic “your fist ends where my face begins” analogy—that is about as far as it goes.

In matters of gun violence, fireworks stubbornness, and public health, individual freedom must be balanced with community responsibility. On a broader, vastly more consequential scale, the capitalist’s freedom to profit must be circumscribed by the health, welfare, and economic security of the community. Freedom without responsibility is inherently anti-democratic. It is merely selfishness masquerading as patriotism.

If I were inclined to decorate my home for the Fourth of July—which I am not—I would fly a banner with a single word printed in bold red, white, and blue: Responsibility. Perhaps we can start a trend for next year.

The Poet’s Duty

Several times a year, I find a reason to return to my favorite poem by the late Grace Paley, with whom I had a nodding acquaintance while living in Vermont. It serves as a vital reminder of what we owe to one another:

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet

It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman

It is the responsibility of the poets to stand on street corners giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at because of the screaming rhetoric

It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy, to hang out and prophesy

It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes

It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C and buckwheat fields and Army camps

It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman

It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman

It is the poet’s responsibility to speak truth to power, as the Quakers say

It is the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless

It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: There is no freedom without justice and this means economic justice and love justice

It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems

It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it on in the way storytellers decant the story of life

There is no freedom without fear and bravery. There is no freedom unless earth and air and water continue and children also continue

It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman, to keep an eye on this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be listened to this time.

Listen to her.

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