The Sting in the National Anthem’s Tail
photo by AmericanButters - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=104151801
Oh say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?
Our national anthem is unusual in that it ends with a question, which can be read in at least three ways.
The way in which Francis Scott Key obviously meant it was: “America is the land of the free and the home of the brave; is the flag still waving over it, or did it get destroyed (or did the defenders of Fort McHenry surrender, and haul it down) ?”
Nowadays, of course, that thing is flying all over the place. So the question is no longer “is it still waving?” The question is “is the place it’s waving over yet the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave?”
Here we have to contend with another double meaning, inhering in the word “yet”. The more common and modern sense is seen in questions like “are we there yet?” But there’s a more archaic sense that we see in “and yet she persevered.” There it’s basically synonymous with “still.”
Francis Scott Key was obviously using the latter. “Is the flag still waving?” In his mind there’s no question that this is the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave. The only question is whether the flag’s still flying over it.
If we substitute the former meaning, though, then the question becomes “Said banner is definitely still waving over this land, but is it the land of the free and the home of the brave yet?”
Key certainly didn’t mean the question that way, since he owned slaves. But viewed through an anti-slavery lens you can answer Key’s question with an emphatic “no,” since not everyone in the land is free yet; that won’t happen at least until emancipation, fifty years after Key writes this thing.
Today we are at least 150 years post-emancipation and the flag is indeed waving everywhere, so Key’s question becomes an inquiry about the current state of the country, and whether it can still be considered the land of the free and the home of the brave. That’s what I ask myself every time I sing the anthem, or hear it sung.
Our freedom has never been perfect, and probably never will be. In some ways we are more free than we used to be, in others, less. The needle moves back and forth, but the general trend is up.
250 years ago the American Revolution started a trend toward freedom all over the world. It was then that the notion of human rights - rights that no tyrant, no state, and no majority may legitimately violate - was first enshrined as the founding principle of government. Imperfectly.
Today, as a result, the entire First World lives in the freest, wealthiest, healthiest, safest, fairest societies that have ever existed on the face of the Earth. This is underappreciated - much tyranny, poverty, disease, danger, and injustice still exist. But we're doing better than ever before.
That is something to celebrate.
Do you have an answer for that question?
My PoV is, you are free only in proportion to your own capacity for courage.