On the Fourth

by Sara Flitner

My most memorable Fourth of July was the year I survived a tornado and made a cake that was decorated like an American flag. The recipe called for a vat of white frosting, blueberries and strawberries for stripes, and small dollops of frosting for stars. I placed the cake in the center of the table, proud of being allowed to share this masterpiece—and hoping my very popular friend would recognize the cake from Seventeen magazine and perhaps see me as worthy of the “in crowd.” 

Just then, the dining room window shattered, littering the room—and my cake—with tiny, menacing shards of glass. Outside, I saw the tornado’s real damage: trees ripped from roots, buckets and saddle blankets in the upper meadow. Our bright red horse trailer was stood up on its crumpled forehead and the truck next to it lay on its back in a dead bug pose, wheels still turning. No one was injured, thankfully, and we hugged each other and laughed nervous laughs. “It’s a good day to be alive in a free country,” one of the old men said. 

I’ve always celebrated the ideals our forefathers envisioned. When my sons were young, I loved watching them abruptly transform from bear cub wrestlers in constant motion to somber witnesses, at attention, when their father came out to hang the American flag from our front door. They were so intent on being worthy patriots, showing respect for flag and country.  

I’ve always loved being on the curb at a parade, all of us waving little flags and watching children scramble for candy as red firetrucks and blue sky and the white teeth of broad smiles flash, pledging allegiance to each other, to freedom, and the shared sense of belonging. There we all stood, at least in my memories, free and united under a banner of common ideals: a desire to protect the lives and liberties of all, to extend personal freedoms to every American.   

This holiday arrives on the heels of decisions that I don’t yet understand fully, though the most obvious implication is that many of us will be far less free. The person at poverty level is not free, nor is the single mom or veteran or ranch hand, as their access to healthcare is threatened by the constricting of Medicaid funding and the predicted closure of hundreds of rural hospitals. The people who work at those hospitals are no longer financially free, and their patients, no longer recipients of local care, are less free, too. 

These are not “party lines.” One in three babies is born on Medicaid in Wyoming. It's quite possible that Medicaid cutoff will cause tiny babies to go without prenatal care and/or cause their mothers to risk their own health as they go without regular visits that may identify preventable—and sometimes fatal—complications. 

There is much less freedom for the working poor, who cashier and clean, who harvest and hoe, who tend small children and provide care in nursing homes. They are also the hired help on our farms and ranches, the front-line faces, and the labor in the hallways of your airport or hospital or child’s school.  

I am not sharing my views out of a desire to persuade agreement to my way of thinking. Believe it or not, none of this has anything to do with my policy priorities or my politics. I am simply wondering how any of us can be free if we allow some of us to become grist for the mill. 

I must ask: Who can be free when we are taught that fearing each other trumps loving each other? When we reject evidence, logic, science, each other?  

For now, I turn to the advice of leaders living and dead, who led with head and heart together. I remember those who thought to fight for our dignity and safety, as Martin Luther King’s dream articulated for all of us.  

I take refuge in the fact that 52 men—men who risked death for their freedom and ours—spelled out the need for separation of power, for government by the people and for the people. I remember that Abraham Lincoln led with deep compassion and precise practicality, believing that “government's role is to do for its citizens what they cannot effectively do for themselves, but should not interfere where individuals can act independently.” 

While I sense that heartbreak lies ahead, there are things we can do to protect our hearts and intellects. In this country, and especially here in the Tetons of Wyoming, we need only remember all the lessons there in nature: Appreciate beauty. Notice where we feel awe. Accept that nature is cycles and seasons, and we are part of them. Remember that nature bats last.   

It is difficult to feel free when lots of people we know and love will suffer, along with people we don’t know. You may even suffer. I may, too. So we work on the idea that true freedom lies inside us all, something I argued with before reading Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”