Our Worst Critics Choose To Stay

United States of America in six words

I love the fourth of July. Usually, we go to the semi-small town where my parents and in-facts live. I love it all, the salt water taffy thrown by five-year-olds from their dance class float, the water balloons and water guns, hot dogs and potato salad, glow sticks and fire works. I love to watch how proudly the veterans stand in their uniforms as the flag goes by. I want to cheer and yell and scream for them, but I always start to cry instead.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote a series of books called "The Gulag Archipelago" about the prison camps in Russia under Josef Stalin. Stalin had more people killed than Hitler (at least 10 million more) but you don't hear about him as much. Solzhenitsyn was a writer, arrested and tortured and sentenced to years in the gulag for no reason he ever knew - perhaps some letters he wrote. He spent his time collecting stories from his fellow inmates and later published them. Many stories were similar, and I read the section on Arrest on the subway home from work one day while I lived in Washington D.C.

Most who were arrested had no idea why:

Since you aren't guilty, then how can they arrest you? It's a mistake! They are already dragging you along by the collar, and you keep exclaiming to youself: "It's a mistake! They'll set things straight and let me out!". . . . Why, then, should you run away? . . After all, you'll only make your situation worse; you'll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And it isn't just that you don't put up any resistance; you even walk down the stairs on tiptoe, as you are ordered to do, so your neighbors won't hear.

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there, . . . but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers or whatever else was at hand?

Yes, resistance should have begun right there, at the moment of the arrest itself.

But it did not begin.

And the most haunting words I've ever read: "We didn't love freedom enough."

I looked up and around the crowded train station under our nation's capitol and I wondered what would happen if two police officers suddenly came up behind. . . .that guy right there.

I looked around at the crowd of tired civil servants and government contractors and students believed that under most circumstances we would protect each other. People have to be taught to be submissive and we Americans are definitely not.

This country is far from perfect, but I still love it.