It is sometimes alleged that people of my own political leanings—what used to be called “moderate” but is now labeled as “bleeding heart liberal”-- do not sufficiently love America. Baloney, I say. Give me the patriotic songs for the Fourth of July, and I can get as emotional as the neighborhood Tea Party activist. I am unfailingly moved by the dream that is still America.
You can always get me up and marching with “Stars and Stripes Forever,” the gold standard of patriotic marches. In particular my eyes get moist when the trumpets and trombones and their big-voiced partners step back and the piccolos step up to play their portion.
The smallest voices in the band, yet they sing along with the rest. To me they sound like the very young and the very old; the homeless, the poor, the uninsured, the addicted, the bullied. They sound like immigrants seeking a home in a land that once proudly declared to the world “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” They sound like people whose skin happens to look something other than European. Now and then you hear a version of “Stars and Stripes Forever” that leaves out the piccolos, and it is simply not the same song; it is poorer for their absence. The people the piccolos play for are America, too, the America I love.
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We are not all the trumpets, loud and successful and aggressive, ready to rule the world with an iron hand. The piccolos also have a part in the song and the country, and if America is to be the America we have always sought to be, we have to remember the piccolos.
