Back in the USA

By Rev. Steve Edington

There was never the slightest doubt in my mind that I’d be on the plane from London’s Heathrow airport to Boston when it was time to leave. Five of the major reasons were getting on board with me: My wife, son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters. There were also my family members in America to come back to, including my 99-year-old mother.

But I had a document in my carry-on bag that would have allowed me to stay in the UK as a full-fledged Brit for as long as I wanted. It was my British birth certificate, issued in Plymouth, England shortly after my birth there in August of 1945. But I didn’t bring it for any legal purpose. I used it instead as a prop I could hold up for a picture as I shared my 80^th birthday cake with my above-mentioned family members at the Air BnB where we were staying in London.

My father served in the United States Navy in the Second World War, stationed on a naval base in Plymouth. He was put on a Construction Battalion. Its acronym—C.B.—became the SeaBees. Dad was a church going man, and while he was a good Baptist, the closest church within walking distance from his Base was a Methodist one. That was where he met a cute young British lady. They were married in the same church in August of 1944. I was born one year later.

At the age of six months, I was brought to America, and to southern West Virginia, where I was raised. At age 18 I applied for an American birth certificate which I was granted through the US Department of State—with Secretary Dean Rusk’s signature, no less. But as far as the Brits are concerned, I am still one of theirs. And while I celebrated my 80^th birthday on British soil, it was one of the few times I have even been outside this country except for an occasional trip to Canada.

Fortunately, my dad never saw any combat in WWII, but he witnessed the devastation the German bombs did to Plymouth. His younger brother, my uncle, served in the US Army in France. Because of his clerical skills, he was put to work in a makeshift Allied office. While largely out of harm’s way, he, too, saw the devastating effect of WWII on the French people.

While dad and my uncle, both now long gone, were spared battlefield action in that horrible struggle, they each did their part, wearing the uniform of their country, to stop the onslaught of fascism across Europe. I remain proud of them for that.

I thought about dad and my uncle on the flight from London to Boston. They had their roles to play in the fight against European fascism in the early 1940s. Now, some eighty years later, I was returning to home to an American kind of fascism, led by an American President and his enablers.

I was coming back to a country with a President who uses his office to feed his never-to-be-satisfied need for power and control, to seek revenge on his perceived enemies, to actually command his own armed forces in some of our nation’s cities, to oversee widespread deportations of immigrants with little or no due process; and who essentially feels his Presidency alone allows him to indulge in whatever manner of ego-gratification he cares to pursue. He has a largely acquiescent Republican controlled Congress, and a largely compliant Supreme Court, who are the enablers of his bottomless-pit power addiction.

More recently he has used, make that exploited, the terrible assassination of Charlie Kirk as a pretext for naming left-leaning organizations as “terrorist” and then threatening to take “appropriate action.”

For all of that, I don’t believe Trump’s brand of fascism will rise to the level of Hitler’s but it sure won’t be for his lack of trying; and not before countless lives continue to be ruined.

No, I did not elevate my British citizenship over my long-held American one when it was time to leave London. Too many things called me back. In addition to my family are my many close friends in a variety of settings, the delightful Unitarian Universalist congregations with whom I continue to have speaking engagements, the group in Lowell—Lowell Celebrates Kerouac—with whom I help organize our annual Jack Kerouac Festivals. And, of course, there are Red Sox games to take in at Fenway. I could make it an even longer list, but I’ll leave it at that. I have too full of a life here to allow a power-obsessed dictator to keep me away.

But there is still the matter of how, now in the ninth decade of my life, I partake in the life I’ve just described in the midst of a fascist wave. How much longer I have remains to be seen, but I know I live in a safe and protected space right now in what is becoming an increasingly unsafe and unprotected place for many. What I do in that space, with all its good things, is the real question. I can raise my voice in the settings available to me, stand and act in solidarity with my Indivisible and No Kings compatriots, and devote whatever efforts I can to Making America America Again.

Woody Guthrie: “This land I’ll defend with my life if need be, but my pastures of plenty must always be free.”

So it is with my personal pastures of plenty, in a land made for you and me.

****

Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, NH. He is a member, and a post President, of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac.