This Great Green State

In our great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, gay lovers are getting married amid an almost too beautiful greening springtime landscape. I’ve never been more pleased with this state since that time it was the only one to vote for George McGovern in 1972. I had a bumper sticker then on my old Celica that read: “Nixon 49, America 1.”

Of course, our governor has to make his political hay with a 1913 statute that disallows out-of-staters to wed in Massachusetts if their state doesn’t recognize said kind of marriage. It’s appropriate that this political opportunist would use a law that was meant to discourage interracial marriages in order to appease the right wing zealots of his party. He joins the likes of Governors Faubus, Barnett, and Wallace in their infamy. He just doesn’t get it.

But America sooner or later does. It may be a costly way to stumble through this world, but the history of this country is a dialectic of unabated greed and a slow revelation of its munificent ideals. Sooner or later, the peoples' eyes become unclouded and perceive that some particular emperor really has no clothes. It may be a long, harmful, and exasperating fight, but history has her ultimate say. And that my brethren is the real final judgement.

In this week that we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Brown v Board of Education and the implementation of Goodridge v Department of Public Health, it’s appropriate to remember the words of Langston Hughes in his poem ‘Let America Be America Again.’ As they say, read the whole thing, but here’s the telltale ending:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!