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Supporting a National Day of Mourning and Prayer on Flag Day, June 14.
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Official Text
WHEREAS, The American flag has commanded a special reverence in Somerville, for the values which it symbolizes - white for the purity of our ideals, red for the valor with which we protect and advance those ideals, and blue for the impartial justice through which those ideals are administered, without fear or favor - are the values that we have sought to achieve, ever since we raised the first American flag at the dawn of the American Revolution; and
WHEREAS, Those values that we have championed have now been confronted with a new and global challenge, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which has led to mass infection with the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a disease which continues to rage, inflicting grave illness, widespread death, and severe economic repercussions, both here and abroad; and
WHEREAS, Given that the response has not measured up to the challenge - neither at home nor abroad - we see the need for America to pause and reflect upon what we have accomplished and what we have failed to accomplish, that is, we see the need to take up the time-honored practice of dedicating a day to mourning our losses, reflecting on our missteps, and praying for the prudence and perseverance to do better; and
WHEREAS, Given that national need, we see the concomitant need of requesting that a well-respected civic leader call us together for our day of civic mourning and prayer - and thus, sum told, there arises a pressing need on our own part to lay out our reasons for this request, as follows; and
WHEREAS Somerville is honored to be the site of the raising of the first large American flag in the United Colonies - the Grand Union Flag - raised over Prospect Hill, New Year's Day, 1776, and most recently commemorated by its ceremonial re-raising this past New Year's Day, 2020; and
WHEREAS, In the face of the new challenge of Royal British oppression against the American Colonies in the 1760's and 1770's, the Grand Union Flag symbolized the determination of the citizens in these Thirteen Colonies to vindicate their "ancient liberties" against the new designs of King George III and his ministers in Parliament, and to vindicate those rights emphatically against the military occupation of Boston; and
WHEREAS, The British evacuation of Boston signaled a major military victory, and yet, the Crown in Parliament redoubled its efforts to suppress the rights of the colonists, naturally the movement for an American Declaration of Independence gained irresistible momentum; as that momentum moved toward the great proclamation of the Declaration on the 4th of July, 1776, it was a Native American, Thomas Green, who petitioned the Second Continental Congress, just beforehand, in June, 1776, for a new flag, one fully symbolizing our new American identity, and who paid the Congress three strings of wampum for said flag, with the Congress responding immediately with the authorization of the new flag, one retaining the thirteen stripes of the Grand Union Flag, but removing the old British Union Jack from the canton and replacing it with "thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation”; and
WHEREAS, The subsequent "Stars and Stripes" became the beloved flag of the new Republic, one "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal;" as the Republic grew, so did the number of stars in the canton and, so too, the ideals to which all our citizens pledged allegiance; and behold, as our ideals progressed, the Red, White, and Blue also came to symbolize a new form of togetherness, our unity in an ever newer and greater diversity; and
WHEREAS, On that same day, the 14th of June, 1776, on which the new flag was authorized, so, too, was the new American Army, to be commanded by George Washington; in the great struggles of the Republic, the Armed Services of the United States, led by the Army, the senior service, have fought under that flag to preserve and extend the ideals of our nation; and
WHEREAS, In the greatest struggle over America's ideals, the irreconcilable difference that divided our nation - the struggle over slavery, "states' rights," including "nullification," and thus, ultimately, the preservation of the Union itself - it was Massachusetts' own poet, James Russell Lowell, who, in drafting the greatest of abolitionist poems, coined the phrase, "new occasions teach new duties" (in "The Present Crisis," 1844), a phrase often invoked by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the Civil Rights movement - and one just invoked by Seán Patrick Cardinal O'Malley, OFM Cap., Archbishop of Boston, in his well-remarked Op-Ed in the Boston Globe, "During the coronavirus, be the better angel" (thus closing the circle with that summons from President Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address); and
WHEREAS, The COVID-19 pandemic presents a "new occasion" and thus teaches "new duties," Somerville is grateful to have been able to respond early and comprehensively to that challenge - we implemented social distancing measures earlier than most communities in the nation, we closed all our schools and city buildings promptly, we postponed civic and sports events for the long term, we soon followed up with detailed citywide advice on face masks and we provided masks for those venturing into public without them, plus we have consistently provided the outreach of a special COVID-19 community team that tenders advice in a multitude of languages; this all-points outreach became all the more important as we increased our precautions so as to keep pace with the deepening regional severity of the pandemic - and all the while, we kept a special lookout for those of our own neighbors who were most impacted and, all too often, were least able to cope with that impact; and
WHEREAS, We note with the deepest regret that, across America, far, far too many communities have been unable to cope with that impact; and, just before we address their plight, we must pause to acknowledge the separate deleterious impact that enforced isolation has had on the mental health of uncounted numbers of Americans of all backgrounds, which is one of the most insidious effects of this pandemic and which concerned neighbors as well as health providers will need to make a special effort to catch and remedy; and
WHEREAS, Among the communities most severely impacted and least well placed to respond to that impact are America's elderly, most especially when trapped in senior-care facilities which were overwhelmed by the pandemic; and likewise disproportionately impacted from coast to coast have been blue-collar workers, who are, by the very nature of their jobs, unable to work remotely; and likewise again disproportionately impacted have been America's communities of color, especially Black and Latinx communities, plus our Indigenous communities, and, perhaps least federally protected of all, our immigrant communities; and
WHEREAS, Our minority communities, especially our Hispanic, African-American, and Native American communities, confront deep and pervasive inequities in all walks of their lives - marked inequities in their reduced access to education, their basic food supply, their life-long income, their slim access to government resources, their frequent encounter of undue burdens placed in the way of participating in government, their vastly disproportionate rate of prosecution and imprisonment, and the extensive pollution of their environment - sum told, the inevitable consequence of these lifelong debilitating factors is, in relevant part, both a consistently reduced standard of health care and a markedly reduced life expectancy; and
WHEREAS, That initial position of reduced health care and life expectancy, already a grievous position, has further served to exacerbate the impact of COVID-19 on these most-vulnerable communities; the dire losses in Chelsea, right next door to Somerville, should fully attest to how much the toll in highly-healthy, buffered communities was multiplied where health care was not up to par; but for the sake of a broader example, we recall that, already, nationwide, by early April, African-American communities were suffering three times the rate of infection and six times the death rate compared to their neighboring white communities; then, by mid-April, Blacks in Louisiana, who accounted for just 32% of the population, had suffered 70% of the deaths; likewise, by the end of April, the Navaho Nation was suffering the third-highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections in the nation, ranking behind only New Jersey and New York, the two most-severely impacted states in the Union; and
WHEREAS, Our immigrant neighbors, as we have witnessed for generation upon generation right here in Somerville, have made a disproportionately significant contribution to the common good - for example, nationwide, our immigrant neighbors represent 13.7% of the population, yet, they account for 28.5% of doctors and 20.9% of nursing assistants - still, despite that extraordinary record and yes, even despite our American ideal expressed in the immortal words of Emma Lazarus ("The New Colossus," 1883), proudly inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty - "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, …," all but a very few categories of immigrants have now been blocked executively at our borders, and this, even though the blockage on our Southern border creates fertile breeding grounds for COVID-19, just as it does in the detention camps for immigrants who had already entered the United States; and
WHEREAS, Given the pervasive scope of the disease, striking down citizens regardless of background or previous health, it is all the more imperative to recognize that there remain outstanding many crucial questions about its nature - Precisely how did the virus make the leap from its original animal hosts to humans? Why does it affect individuals in such strikingly different ways? Is the pathogen beginning to take longer (e.g., in Northeast China) to reveal its symptoms, thus making it all the harder to detect and contain? Is the virus likely to undergo such deep genetic mutations as to defeat the initial protections just being developed against it? Can an individual's hard-won acquired immunity against it be lost in time? Can one individual's acquired immunity in the form of antibodies in convalescent blood plasma be transferred not just to a few other individuals, but to many individuals by being somehow scaled up? And can a vaccine against COVID-19 be developed in record time? Or is herd immunity our last recourse? - and the recognition of such deep and pressing puzzles requires a fuller commitment of our common resources on every level, from the local lab and city hall to the corridors of power on Wall Street and in Washington; and
WHEREAS, The sheer size of our losses threatens to reduce us to gaping at the toll in the nightly news: for the daily, unceasing growth of the numbers threatens to numb us to the twofold personal devastation in each and every death, devastation both by the loss of the life of a valued member of our community and by the bitterness engendered in many of his/her survivors, Americans who recognize, with deep anguish, that such sacrifices were unnecessary, if only the proper authorities had acted swiftly and comprehensively in January; and
WHEREAS, Just as these tragic "new occasions" call forth "new duties," we are deeply grateful to note that, in multiple walks of life, these duties have been magnificently fulfilled, as, for instance, they have been by our first responders - our nurses and doctors, our policemen, EMTs, and firemen - and, equally serving on the frontline against this invisible enemy, by our grocery store employees, by our food delivery folks, by our public transit staff, by our pharmacists, and by all our courageous neighbors who have struggled to keep us safe and whole, by those who take the extra risk of staffing the ICUs, by those who take the extra step of looking out for our neighbors who are elderly and alone, and, very importantly, by those who strive out of sight but never out of mind: those who labor in research labs around the clock to test the possible application of antibodies and prophylactic medical "cocktails," so as to protect us in the interim, and who strive just as much to create a vaccine that would eventually give all of us a new opportunity for a common life; and
WHEREAS, Sadly, the labors of these heroes have been deeply undercut by our woeful lack of preparedness for the pandemic, and this, despite years of expert warnings on the inevitability of just such a pandemic and, worse, undercut by the waste of the special, last-minute response time that was afforded this country, afforded by intrepid Chinese doctors who reached out, on their own initiative, to warn with their American counterparts in the very first days of January, that is, last warnings that were met, tragically, by the official failure to act immediately and consistently, in January, to order all the safeguards mandated by the pandemic; and
WHEREAS, The time-honored response in our nation to failures of such a grievous caliber is to observe a national day of mourning and prayer, especially where the failure was combined with a clear and present danger, thus powerfully fueling that fusion of mourning and prayer, a fusion such as we hear in the call with which Boston lead the Thirteen Colonies in September, 1768, and which thus set the pattern for the subsequent calls to mourning, fasting, prayer, such as the calls to be issued by many of the Founders of the Republic in the 1770's - for instance, calls such as those issued by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, George Mason, George Washington, John Hancock, John Trumbull, James Madison, et hoc omnes - and calls to be issued throughout the entire Revolutionary War by the Second Continental Congress, 1775-1783; to be followed subsequently by President John Adams in 1798 and 1799; and so on through the annals of the Republic, with such highlights as those offered by President Zachary Taylor in the teeth of the cholera epidemic of 1849, by President Lincoln, not once, but twice during the Civil War, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on D-Day, 1944, by President Truman upon the surrender of Imperial Japan, ending the Second World War in August, 1945, by President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; we note that all of these were solemn pauses which served to bind up the wounds of the nation and to renew our purpose and strength, so as to deepen at once our ideals, our valor, and our justice: the red, white, and blue of our civic life; and
WHEREAS, The Founders of the Republic, even as they committed to that new set of ideals, knowingly drew on deep practices of sorrowful reflection and renewed purpose, specific practices - Catholic and Protestant alike - bequeathed by their own Christian heritage: a practice first widely propagated on the Continent of Europe by Irish monks and nuns at the transition from the Ancient World to the Medieval World, a practice later formalized by Charlemagne, the first of the Holy Roman Emperors, in the teeth of the woeful Continental famine of 792-793, when he also required, as a civic duty, that all landlords look after their tenants until the next harvest was safely brought in; this formalized practice became a particular recourse of the English, beginning by no later than the national day of mourning and prayer instituted by the Anglo-Saxon King, Aethelred II, in 1009 (faced with an enemy every bit as implacable as the coronavirus: the marauding Vikings); in rapid succession, Norman-English monarchs such as Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III made ready recourse to it throughout the 14th century (when many other proto-Modern Anglo-American institutions were also arising); King Charles II would reinvigorate the tradition in the wake of the Great Fire of London (September, 1666); and Queen Victoria would do likewise in March, 1847, for the entire United Kingdom, in the midst of the unprecedented devastation wrought by the Irish Famine (an Gorta Mór: the Great Hunger, 1845-1849), that epic tragedy which brought, as an unexpected blessing, so many Irish immigrants to our shores, and especially here to contribute to our great cities; and
WHEREAS, That venerable Christian tradition took on a new and less denominational gloss in the 20th century, and especially when King George VI, in the teeth of the failure of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), called upon all subjects of the United Kingdom, regardless of faith, to pray for the successful delivery of the British, French, Norwegian, and Polish forces trapped by the Wehrmacht at Dunkirk; and so the whole Kingdom knelt down, in many different houses of worship, that Sunday, the 26th of May, 1940; and when those ragged Allied forces, against all reasonable military expectations, were successfully evacuated to England within four days, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, rightly called it the "miracle of deliverance;" and so, the Allied forces would survive and eventually, joined by our American forces, the Allies would prevail; and
WHEREAS, Our Republic proudly includes other faith traditions with their own venerable traditions of mourning, fasting, and prayer; for example, on Wednesday evening, the 29th of July, Jewish Americans will begin to observe the saddest day in the Hebrew calendar, Tisha B'Av (the Ninth day of the month of Av), commemorating several of the greatest disasters to befall the Jewish people over the ages, on or near the Ninth of Av, ranging primarily from the Destruction of Solomon's Temple (587 B.C.E.) and the Destruction of the Second Temple (70 C.E.) to Hitler's "Final Solution" (die Endlösung), which triggered the Holocaust (the Shoah: 1941-1945); and, for yet another example of our rich mosaic of faith traditions, we note our Shiite Muslim neighbors, who, beginning at sunset on Friday, the 21st of August, will take up the mourning of Muharram, commemorating the devastating defeat and death, at the Battle of Karbala (10 October A.D. 680/10 Muharram A.H. 61), of the deeply impressive Imam Husayn ibn Ali (a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, PBUH), and of many of his family and his companions, all the more devastating given the fact that Imam Husayn is held by Shiites to have been the Rightful Caliph and successor to the Prophet; and
WHEREAS, Right alongside this great faith mosaic, our Republic has always been enriched with the contributions to the common good made by "free-thinkers" and other religiously non-affiliated citizens, individuals, be they agnostics or atheists, whose pause on such a day for reflection and whose deepened resolve is equally to be treasured; and
WHEREAS, The destruction alike of lives and livelihoods wrought by COVID-19 calls for a comparably appropriate day of mourning, prayer, and/or reflection, a day of such sustaining exercise as (a) the great religions and other reflections in our Republic and as (b) our august civic traditions have both accustomed us to observe, we recognize that the logical choice of such a day would be none other than our forthcoming Flag Day, falling on Sunday, the 14th of June, for, as President Woodrow Wilson so memorably proclaimed, Flag Day should call us "to rededicate ourselves to our ideals," to working as "one and inseparable," so that all of us may "stand with united hearts for an America which no man can corrupt, no influence draw away from its ideals, no force divide against itself;" and we recognize that no words could be more timely; and
WHEREAS, When we are reunited in our resolve, when we are freed of corruption, distraction, and division, then we Americans can astound the world with our response, as we did at Saratoga and Yorktown, as we did after Pearl Harbor, and in the Race to the Moon, and against HIV/AIDS; then and only then, do we give our best proof of the continued vitality of what Alexis de Tocqueville was so pleased to discover among us, our "habits of the heart," the habits that make us and our democracy strong; and
WHEREAS, Such unity of resolve is the sine qua non for launching a call so that, on the very day, Flag Day, when we recommit ourselves to our national ideals, we also pause to mourn our great failures this year, and then we pray to do far, far better by our neighbors and our ideals, we pray and we act as intrepid Irish nuns and Charlemagne, as Jewish survivors and Shiite successors, as our Founders and our great leaders in ages past, like Lincoln and FDR and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., have prayed and acted; NOW THEREFORE BE IT
RESOLVED, That the City Council of the City of Somerville hereby declares Flag Day, Sunday, June 14, 2020 as a National Day of Mourning & Prayer.
SUBMITTED this Thursday, the 28th day of May, the birthday of the late Walker Percy (whose last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, reminds us of the consequences when our public morality and public health are severely abused), and the birthday of the "Empress of Soul," Gladys Knight (whose exuberant part in the ensemble charity recording of "That's What Friends Are For" reminds us of what gifted individuals can do to lift all of us and thus serve the common good).