One Good Rose

An audio version of this essay is available here

During his seven year imprisonment Nicola Sacco, convicted alongside Bartolomeo Vanzetti and awaiting final sentence during a series of ill-fated appeals, corresponded often with his wife and son. In one letter he reminisced about days of youth in Torremaggiore in southern Italy, describing his picking grapes off a roadside arbor, and then wild flowers by the bunch. Finally, he writes of trekking a mile or so down a rutted path in search of “one good rose” to complete the bouquet. After their eventual executions, the bodies of the two self-identified anarchists were cremated and the ashes returned to Italy. Vanzetti’s remains were buried alongside those of his mother, while Sacco’s found rest beneath a monument in his hometown, where the rose could search for him.

The two immigrated to the United States in 1908, but didn’t meet until 1917 during a labor demonstration and shortly before moving together to Mexico to avoid the military draft. Both were avowed Galleanists, followers of anarchist leader Luigi Galleani. Galleani advocated the violent overthrow of the government and included in his published works a bomb-making manual. There can be no doubt, whether guilty or innocent of the specific crime for which they were convicted, that Sacco and Vanzetti paid the price for their personal beliefs, the company they kept and the times in which they lived.

In viewing the events of nearly a century past, small details reflect some elements in our culture that have hardly changed. A fear of foreigners, the demonization of formal associations of workers and the application of iron-fisted reprisal against anyone found to hold beliefs differing with the dogma of American catechism, all carried out with barely a nod to the avowed individual rights contained in our sacred national documents. From this perspective, patriotism takes on the appearance of a radical religion, the kind that holds its own truths to be self-evident and any other version renounceable as treasonous heresy.

There has been something wrong with Americans from our beginning, this quest for freedom from distant oppression begetting oppressions at home. There was certainly no quarter given the Tories, the ultra-conservatives of their day, in the wake of the colonial succession, just as there would have been none for the rebels had the King’s will been done. The Federal occupation of the Confederate states at the conclusion of the Civil War still grates against the consciousness of residents of the South. We are bad winners, evidenced by the narrow degree of charity offered our enemies in victory, those limits justified by our expectations in an obverse result. In many respects, our nation is no different from any other, except for our living in a constant state of war, mostly against ourselves.

A society at war is obligated to abridge some individual freedoms to defend against outward threats. When, in our history as a nation, has there been no identifiable threat? Questionable characters of every color litter the national rogues’ gallery. Once a particular threat is eliminated, another immediately rises to take its place. One can conceive of the possibility that we have been living under varying levels of Marshall Law from the outset without realizing it. Our rights are assumed, but rarely tested. When invoking those individual rights against the interests of the State, we seldom win. We are educated slaves, quick to argue against that very point, as sure as a novice priest will defend the virginity of Mary by describing his own celibacy. Both arguments lend themselves to similarly absurd conclusions based solely on the power of indoctrination, where belief alone is sufficient proof to the believer. It should be obvious to an adult mind that any central power, be it based in the Vatican or in Washington D.C., will attempt, by any means, to maintain its hold on that power, primarily through the manipulation of its subjects. Yet, most of us allow ourselves to be manipulated.  In that sense, we are the occupied, losers in the fight for true freedom; any attempt by mere citizens to appreciably alter the balance of power is met with the swift excommunicative removal from the flock.

It is difficult to reimagine our national demeanor from a single reference point without first removing our own perception of reality from the equation. The most far-fetched method that springs to mind is this – what if the American Nazi Party had come into power? There are many among our population who would embrace such change and proudly wear the swastika armband. There would, at the beginning, be just as many people who, finding such change abhorrent, raised their voices in protest. Accusations of being un-American sympathizers of our enemies would silence most of those voices; thick prison walls gagging the rest. Meanwhile, the vast majority of citizens would signal their grudging acceptance of the inevitable, either through patriotic obeisance or the internal policing principles of self-preservation and self-interest. Exactly what occurred in Germany could just as easily have occurred here, accomplished through the coercive power of political inertia, combined with the sleight-of-hand illusions contained in the face of a perceived evil.

Reality informs us by its relation to our own experiences and is, therefore, never complete. No committee, party, convention, country, alliance or planet full of people can offer an accurate picture of what is truly real. The spark of life is reserved for the individual and it is within the spark itself where an element of truth resides. Each of us is this close to a moment of enlightenment, approaching the point where worlds of questionable worth intersect and some singular revelation squeezes through a crack in between and catches our doubtful eye. As we pass our lives, gathering the fruit and smelling the flowers, we must take some time to find that one good rose.