“The Star-Spangled Banner,” by many accounts, is one of the most vocally difficult songs to perform, with its high and low notes, its extreme swings in melody, and its sometimes antiquated syntax. That our national anthem is hard to sing seems fitting to me, though. Life can be hard. Liberty is hard-won. And the pursuit of happiness is hard work.
But as Americans, we are used to hard work. We believe that our goals are within reach if we want them badly enough. We are accustomed to striving for the American Dream.
That’s not to say that we don’t face some pretty formidable obstacles, and many of us can become disillusioned. The American Dream — that the United States is the land of opportunity — often gets buried in politics and policies. One example that hits close to home is impossibly expensive health care, about which I complain long and loud to anyone who will listen because I am in the category of people stung with higher costs and diminishing benefits.
Concern about the economy — whether it’s good or bad depends on whom you ask — and erratic foreign relations are other examples. Partisan extremism, the government’s use and defense of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and the wholesale spying on U.S. citizens raise additional questions about the direction in which we are heading as a nation.
And yet, and yet … I have visited and lived in countries where the people exist under constant oppression. Countries where the fruits of their hard work are not their own and where their dreams are what the current government says they are.
Americans continue to stand under the Stars and Stripes and put their lives on the line to defend our freedoms and our civil rights, and to attempt to rectify social injustice the world over. Both my mother and my father were veterans of World War II, and are now at rest at Fort Logan National Cemetery. Whenever my mother would hear “The Star-Spangled Banner,” she would get goosebumps. My parents knew what freedom meant, and they passed their ideals of patriotism on to me.
What I also know is that freedom is hard to secure, and even harder to get back once it is lost. Eroding the liberties that led to the formation of these United States — and restricting the freedoms for which my parents fought to safeguard for others — is a slippery slope that continues to alarm me.
Our national anthem does not tell us, but rather asks us, if that “Star-Spangled Banner” yet waves over the land of the free and the home of the brave. My own answer is this: To be free, we also have to be brave.
We have to be brave enough to speak out for what we believe in, and to speak up for those who have no voice. Brave enough to stand up for the freedoms — at home and around the world — that so many Americans have battled for since the birth of our nation.
I am fortunate to live in a country where I can write these words. I am lucky that I have not only the opportunity but also the obligation to be brave. When I see the Stars and Stripes, I think of the song that was always in my mother’s heart. The song that gave her goosebumps … for all the right reasons. The song for which I place my hand over my own heart and sing along. The song that is both a promise and a challenge: that to be free, we also have to be brave.
Andrea W. Doray is a communication consultant, writer, and editor, and is an instructor in the Young Writers Program at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She was a member of the 2014 Colorado Voices panel.
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