Creed
by Hal Borland
I am an American:
That's the way we put it,
Simply, without any swagger, without any
brag,
In those four plain words.
We speak them softly, just to ourselves.
We roll them on the tongue, touching every
syllable, getting the feel of them, the
enduring flavor.
We speak them humbly, thankfully, reverently:
I am an American.
They are more than words, really.
They are the sum of the lives of a vast
multitude of men and women and wide-eyed children.
They are a manifesto to mankind; speak
those four words anywhere in the
world -- yes, anywhere -- and those who
hear will recognize their meaning.
They are a pledge. A pledge that stems from
a document which says: "When in the
course of human events," and goes on from
there.
A pledge to those who dreamed that dream
before it was set to paper, to those who
have lived it since, and died for it.
Those words are a covenant with a great host
of plain Americans, Americans who put
their share of meaning into them.
Listen, and you can hear the voices echoing
through them, words that sprang white-hot
from bloody lips, scornful lips, lips a
tremble with human pity:
"Don't give up the ship! Fight her till she
dies... Damn the torpedoes! Go ahead!
. . . Do you want to live forever? . . . Don't
cheer, boys; the poor devils are dying."
Laughing words, June-warm words, words
cold as January ice:
"Root, hog, or die... I've come from Alabama with my banjo... Pike's Peak or bust!... Busted, by God!... When you say that, smile... Wait till you see the whites of their eyes... With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right... I am not a Virginian, but an
American."
You can hear men in assembly summoned,
there in Philadelphia, hear the scratch of
their quills as they wrote words for the
hour and produced a document for the
ages.
You can hear them demanding guarantees
for which they suffered through the hell of
war, hear a Yankee voice intoning the text
of ten brief amendments.
You can hear the slow cadences of a gaunt
and weary man at Gettysburg, dedicating
not a cemetery, but a nation.
You can hear those echoes as you walk along
the streets, hear them in the rumble of
traffic; you can hear them as you stand at
the lathe, in the roaring factory; hear them
in the clack of train wheels, in the drumming throb of the air liner; hear them in
the corn fields and in the big woods and in
the mine pits and the oil fields.
But they aren't words any longer; they're a
way of life, a pattern of living.
They're the dawn that brings another day in
which to get on the job.
They're the noon whistle, with a chance to get
the kinks out of your back, to get a bowl of
soup, a plate of beans, a cup of coffee into
your belly.
They're evening, with another day's work
done; supper with the wife and kids; a
movie, or the radio, or the newspaper or a
magazine -- and no Gestapo snooping at the
door and threatening to kick your teeth in.
They are a pattern of life as lived by a free
people, freedom that has its roots in rights
and obligations:
The right to go to a church with a cross or a
star or a dome or a steeple, or not to go to
any church at all; and the obligation to respect others in that same right.
The right to harangue on a street corner, to
hire a hall and shout your opinions till your
tonsils are worn to a frazzle; and the obligation to curb your tongue now and then.
The right to go to school, to learn a trade, to
enter a profession, to earn an honest living;
and the obligation to do an honest day's
work.
The right to put your side of the argument in
the hands of a jury; and the obligation to
abide by the laws that you and your delegates have written in the statute books.
The right to choose who shall run our government for us, the right to a secret vote
that counts just as much as the next fellow's
in the final tally; and the obligation to use
that right, and guard it and keep it clean.
The right to hope, to dream, to pray; the obligation to serve.
These are some of the meanings of those four
words, meanings we don't often stop to
tally up or even list.
Only in the stillness of a moonless night, or in
the quiet of a Sunday afternoon, or in the
thin dawn of a new day, when our world is
close about us, do they rise up in our memories and stir in our sentient hearts.
Only then? That is not wholly so -- not today!
For today we are drilling holes and driving
rivets, shaping barrels and loading shells,
fitting wings and welding hulls,
And we are remembering Wake Island, and
Bataan, and Corregidor, and Hong Kong
and Singapore and Batavia;
We are remembering Warsaw and Rotterdam
and Rouen and Coventry.
Remembering, and muttering with each rivet
driven home: "There's another one for
remembrance!"
They're plain words, those four. Simple
words.
You could write them on your thumbnail, if
you chose,
Or you could sweep them all across the sky,
horizon to horizon.
You could grave them on stone, you could
carve them on the mountain ranges.
You could sing them, to the tune of "Yankee
Doodle."
But you needn't. You needn't do any of those
things,
For those words are graven in the hearts of
130,000,00 people,
They are familiar to 130,000,000 tongues,
every sound and every syllable.
But when we speak them we speak them
softly, proudly, gratefully:
I am an American.
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