Carry the Torch

There is a story the comfortable love to tell, and it goes like this: America was finished at the founding. It was handed down whole and perfect, like a watch in a velvet box, and the only thing required of us now is to wind it gently and never, ever ask what time it is. In this story, the person who agitates — who marches, who organizes, who stands in the street and says this is wrong — is an ingrate. A malcontent. Un-American.

That story is precisely backward. The country was not handed down. It was fought up — from the ground, by people with dirt under their nails and no rank to their names, against power that called them criminals for wanting better. The men we are now told to revere as marble Founders were, to the crown they defied, a gang of tax-dodging troublemakers committing treason in print.

Consider the immigrant corset-maker’s son who arrived in the colonies broke and unknown, and who, in the worst winter of the war, scratched out words on the head of a drum by firelight. They were read aloud to barefoot, freezing, half-deserting troops on the banks of the Delaware — and those words turned a retreat into a republic. Thomas Paine held no office and owned no land. He was a nobody. The torch he helped light was the single most dangerous thought of his age: that ordinary people are fit to govern themselves, and owe no obedience to anyone born above them.

That torch did not stay lit on its own. Every generation since has had to pick it up and carry it through its own dark, because the founders wrote a promise larger than the country they actually built. They declared that all are created equal while a quarter of the nation was held in chains. The promise and the practice were a canyon apart — and so the tradition of America became the long, stubborn, bloody work of dragging the practice toward the promise.

Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read in open defiance of the law that said a slave must not, stood up and named the bluff for what it was. He did not ask power to be kind. He told the truth about how power actually yields.

After Douglass, the women who were jailed and force-fed for the radical crime of wanting to vote. After them, the workers — Mother Jones in the coalfields telling miners their union was not a praying institution but a fighting one. And here the thread runs straight into my own blood.

My grandfather was born Paul Ryan in San Francisco, a dressmaker’s son. He left school at fifteen because the family needed the money, went to sea as a teenager, and came home to become the rank-and-file journalist of the waterfront, writing under the name Mike Quin. When the police shot two strikers dead on the docks in 1934, he set it down in plain words so it could never be quietly tidied away — because he understood that the powerful do not fear your anger nearly as much as they fear your memory.

Paine, Douglass, Jones, Quin — a printer, a fugitive, an old woman, a sailor. Not a duke among them. This is the actual American lineage: not a bloodline of the well-born, but a relay of nobodies who refused to be nothing.

America was not handed down. It was fought up — inch by inch, by people with no rank to their names who decided the promise was worth the price.

We have to be precise here, because no word is more often waved like a flag over things that would make it blush than the word values. American values are not a flag. They are not an anthem, or a birthplace, or a bumper sticker, or a particular accent, or the right last name. They are a set of promises — most of them written down, every one of them still owed. Strip away the pageantry and here is what is actually underneath:

Notice what is on that list and what is not. There is nothing about which god you pray to, or where your grandparents were born, or whom you voted for last November. The values are not tribal. They are not partisan. They belong to no party and never have, because they are older than every party now living.

And notice this, too: not one of these promises has ever been fully kept. They are not achievements to be admired in a museum. They are an argument we made to ourselves at the start and have been straining to live up to ever since. To love this country honestly is not to pretend it has already become what it swore to be. It is to insist, stubbornly and out loud, that it must.

Patriotism is not the belief that America has kept its promises. It is the refusal to let America break them.

And then there came a time when the promise was threatened not by a king across the sea, but by something far worse: regimes built deliberately on the opposite of every value named above. Regimes that made cruelty a science and murder a policy, that herded human beings into camps and innocents into ovens, that declared whole peoples unfit to live. When that darkness rose, Americans went.

Not generals and not aristocrats — them too, but mostly not them. Mostly it was farm kids and dock workers’ sons, clerks and mechanics and schoolteachers, boys who had never been farther from home than the next county, who put on a uniform and crossed two oceans to stand between the innocent and the machinery of annihilation. Many never came back. Many who did came back carrying things they would never set down.

They did not go for plunder or for empire. The men who threw open the gates of the camps and saw, with their own eyes, what fascism actually builds when no one stops it — those men understood, finally and exactly, what they had been sent to defend. Not a flag as a piece of cloth, but the freedoms behind it: to speak, to worship, to live without want, to sleep without fear. And not only at home. As the country put it in that grim winter, those freedoms were owed to people everywhere in the world — which is the most generous and most demanding sentence this nation has ever spoken about itself.

We owe those veterans more than a parade and a discount on a Tuesday. We owe them the only tribute that actually means anything: a country still worth what they paid for it. You do not honor the dead of Normandy by letting the freedoms they died for quietly rot at home. You do not thank the old soldier in the veterans’ ward by forgetting the moment you leave it. The nurse who sits with him through the night, tending a stranger because his suffering is her business — she is keeping the very same faith he kept on a beach sixty years before. Care for the innocent is the through-line. It always was.

You do not honor the ones who went by admiring their sacrifice. You honor them by being worth it.

Here, then, is the whole inheritance, gathered in one place. The torch was lit on a frozen riverbank at Trenton. It was carried through the slave markets by people who refused to stay property, through Seneca Falls by women who refused to stay silent, down Market Street behind two coffins by workers who refused to be run over, onto the beaches of Normandy and across the bridge at Selma by people who decided that someone else’s freedom was worth their own blood. And by a long chain of hands, most of whose names we will never know, it has reached us. It is in our hands right now — burning bright or guttering low depending entirely on what we choose to do in the next few years.

A torch is not an heirloom. You do not put it under glass and admire it. A torch is a fire, and a fire does only one of two things: it spreads, or it dies. To “carry the torch” is not to honor it from a safe distance. It is to pick it up while it is still burning and walk into the dark with it, knowing it may scorch your hands. That is the price. It was always the price.

So carry it. Fight injustice where you actually find it — not the abstract kind in a headline, but the concrete kind down the street: the neighbor being treated as disposable, the worker being ground down, the family being made to disappear. Stand up for the little guy — the overlooked, the overworked, the one nobody is bothering to count — because that is not charity. It is citizenship. It is the dues we owe on an inheritance we did not earn and cannot keep without paying.

The comfortable will call this dangerous. Let them. Paine’s were dangerous thoughts; the crown said so. Douglass’s were dangerous thoughts; the law said so. My grandfather named his book Dangerous Thoughts and wore the phrase like a medal — because the only thoughts the powerful ever trouble themselves to fear are the ones that might cost them something. If they are calling your conscience dangerous, you are very likely standing exactly where your forefathers stood.

These are the times that try us. The torch has come down through every generation that bled for it and reached, against all odds, our ordinary hands. Do not let it go out on our watch. Carry it forward, hold it high enough to light the way for the ones behind us — and remember, as the man wrote on a drumhead in the dark: the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Fight, and fight, and fight like hell — for the living, and for the country we were promised and have not yet become.