JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

* EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is an encore column that Joseph N. Bell

wrote two years ago.

If you want to be shaken up a bit, ask the young people in your view

why we celebrate the Fourth of July. If half of them know -- not in vague

generalities, but very specifically what happened on that day -- then you

have quite a remarkable awareness of American history in your

neighborhood. And if one-tenth of them care, you might even have some of

the vestiges of a badly out-of-date emotion we used to call patriotism.

That wasn’t a problem when I was growing up. I had an uncle named

French Quinn who was a lawyer and general mover and shaker in the

county-seat town of Decatur, Ind. I always think of him come the Fourth

of July because I still remember vividly many childhood years of going to

the local park on that holiday and listening to my uncle make his

patriotic speech. It never varied, and I could have repeated it word for

word after a few years, but it still would have been unthinkable to miss

that event. The appeal was clearly more emotional than intellectual.

My uncle spoke from a bandstand that housed concerts on summer

evenings. There were flags draped around the podium, and the high school

band set the tone of the day with rousing patriotic music -- heavy on

John Phillips Sousa -- before he started speaking. Patriotism was not a

frivolous matter, and July 4 -- which also happens to be my birthday --

was its banner day.

Then it was home to shoot off my private store of fireworks with my

friend, Eddie, whose family always shared the holiday with mine.

On one memorable Fourth, I had a firework -- a triple rocket -- I had

been saving for last, and I set it up carefully in the middle of the

yard. As I bent over to light it -- the high point of my day -- Eddie ran

up, said “I want to do it,” and pushed me aside. I was outraged, and in

the scuffle that followed, the triple rocket was both ignited and turned

over on its side.

Eddie and I ran, and Eddie fell over a hedge. He lay helplessly,

thrashing his legs on top of the hedge while the triple rocket grazed him

three times in the seat of his pants. I regarded this incident as a

combined sign from God and the forefathers of our country demonstrating

to all of us in highly dramatic fashion that justice -- a cornerstone of

the nation founded on this day -- will indeed, somehow, eventually

prevail.

Now fireworks are something we watch on Independence Day from a

distant hillside, set off by unseen hands under strict supervision. And

patriotism -- a celebration of country -- is also something we view at a

distance, if at all.

When I suggest this rather hesitantly to members of more recent

generations of Americans, many of them say -- with considerable

justification -- that there is far too much going on these days that

discourages both trust and respect among Americans toward their country

and its leaders.

As a result, we have become very suspicious as a societyof anything

that smacks of institutionalized emotion.

Far too many Americans have become convinced that patriotism requires

looking at one’s country with glasses so thickly rose-coated that the

wearer can no longer see the enormous inequities and injustices in our

society.

Quite the opposite is true. One of the basic freedoms we’ve always

enjoyed is the freedom to dissent from one another and from the decisions

of our government. Done legally and responsibly, by respecting the rights

of those who disagree with us, such dissent can be the highest form of

patriotism.

The cynics who feed off the short view of current events and leaders

in this country might usefully consider the long view on this Fourth of

July: Slowly and often painfully, the precepts that motivated the men who

signed the Declaration of Independence are standing the test of a world

and a nation whose complexities could not have even been imagined in

1776.

Patriotism can’t be force fed, nor can such symbols as playing the

“Star-Spangled Banner” before public events or repeating the Pledge of

Allegiance by rote substitute for it. Patriotism has to be felt. Perhaps

the kind of simple, unsophisticated warmth a lot of us, like my Uncle

French, used to feel when we celebrated the Fourth will never be possible

again. Maybe now we need to find a new kind of patriotism that can regain

the warmth and the long view, while at the same time accepting

intellectually the inequities and complexities as we work to right them.

As for me, someday I would like to have one more triple rocket in my

yard -- pointed, this time, to the sky.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.