Unscathed, Still There

The world reaches me out of order.

Most people are handed a scene whole; the shape, the distance, and the face of a thing arrive together, in a single glance they never think about. I am legally blind. What comes to me first is rarely what comes to others first. A sound before its source. A voice before the body that carries it. Authority before the person wearing it. I assemble the world in a sequence that I do not get to choose, working for what the sighted spend without noticing, and by the time the whole picture arrives, I have usually already met its loudest part.

I did not know, walking out on the Fourth of July, that this way of seeing would show me something about the country I could not catch any other way.

I want to begin where the day began, because, at this desk in the days since, I keep trying to understand how I traveled the distance between the morning and the dark.

The morning of the Fourth, I walked out into my complex and found it finely dressed for the occasion, flags in the windows, bunting on the railings, neighbors out in the early cool to catch a breeze. I carried a doubleness with me, as I nearly always do now; it is the occupational condition of reading culture and power for a living, that you cannot fully unsee. And yet, passing amid that earnest color gave me an impulse, and I called out, “Happy Birthday, America!” The answer came back wordless: smiles. Only smiles. And their enthusiasm surprised me into a gladness I did not plan to feel. The doubleness did not leave me. The gladness simply arrived beside it, unbidden, faster than my analysis; my neighbors did not argue me into warmth; they smiled me into it, and the two of them walked together the rest of the day.

Further along, the morning offered its one small omen, though I could not read it yet. Barricades. A traffic light stripped down to a single flashing yellow signaling proceed, but watch. Caution, with no object I could name. I did not know what it was for, so I went home and looked it up, and that is how I learned what the evening held: four hundred drones, live music, student art, and the country’s two hundred and fiftieth year. It was then that I decided to attend my first drone show. I share this with you in the order I learned it because the order matters. The caution reached me before its meaning did. It lodged first and explained itself later, which is, I think now, how a warning works on a body.

My gladness held all day. It held through the afternoon and into the evening and right up to the threshold of the display itself, which is where it broke, and where I should share what happened, because I continue to turn it over more times than I can count.

When the drone show began, I learned that I’d settled in behind it; someone said so, kindly, which was why the formations took me a moment longer to read, assembling themselves out of the dark at my own pace. I decided to cross the street to the front, then a voice barked out of the night to stop me — the barricade, the security — and because of how I see, the voice reached me before the woman did: authority first, arriving as sound, the person still somewhere I could not yet find. The fear came in that gap. Then I looked into her eyes, middle-aged, nice enough, a body doing a job, and I did what the fear had already decided. I deferred. I asked: “Can I go back to where I was?” She let me. I returned to my place, and the permission did not soothe me. It confirmed me where I stood.

As the drones rose, humming with the sound of a thousand bees, and finding their formations, there were no bombs bursting in air. I caught myself asking the old anthem question in reverse: without the bombs, how would we know our flag was still there?

Francis Scott Key saw the flag by the light of the shelling. Bombs bursting in air was not a metaphor; it was the proof. The flag was still there because it survived the bombardment. Every Fourth since, we re-enact that bombardment and call it celebration: the boom, the concussion in the chest, the acrid gunpowder drifting over the crowd. This year the boom was gone, and in its place an eerie silence haunted the festivities.

Into that silence the icons streamed. The Liberty Bell, ringing back and forth without a sound. A covered wagon, rolling westward across the darkness, across a sky that is never empty. “We the People,” spelled out in light. A dazzling flag. No fireworks I ever saw looked this… perfect.

And here is the tension I could not resolve and decided not to. That silence was a mercy. No booms to send dogs bolting under beds. No percussion to return the veteran to the firefight, or the survivor of gun violence to the worst night of a life. A quieter Fourth is a kinder one. I know this and will not pretend otherwise.

We humans adapt, and I wanted to know to what. It is wildfire season in California. Pollution sits at warning levels across Los Angeles County. Fireworks became a hazard we can no longer quite afford, and so we reached for the drones, four hundred of them, calm and uniform and obedient, tracing our symbols without a spark. What makes this artful? Who programmed them, and how? Were they watching us as we watched them? And once I asked that, my mind moved to the sentence I could not unthink: the silent machine drawing the flag across the sky is kin to the silent machine that draws a target across a village. The same technology. A different night. And the covered wagon had rolled west under that same sky, over the same ground maps called empty and never was, so that the whole lineage stood there at once: the eye that once looked west and called it destiny now looks down and calls it security.

Two hundred and fifty years. This is how we marked it, the founding “We” written in the glimmering light of the instrument that watches us, in a silence we told ourselves was peace.

I did not understand the yellow light until I sat down to write this. It is still flashing in me. I understand now that the question I asked the guard was never only about a place to stand. “Can I go back to where I was?” At this desk, I hear the other voices that sentence passed through before mine, the people compelled to ask a country whether it might let them return to ground already theirs. She said “yes.” That was the mercy, and that was the warning. I am still not certain, on the far side of that silent and perfect sky, which “yes” or whose “yes” it was.

Like social and cultural puzzle pieces, the voice reached me first, out of the dark, all authority; then her body and uniform came into view, and I saw the woman inside the uniform, the tired person, separate from the duty she wore. Seeing her did not make me safe. Even as I told them apart, part of me rehearsed what I would do if she responded “no.” The crowd, though, I could read plainly. Walking out beneath that quiet sky, I looked at the people I stood with in the night, and the sorting came clear: some came to break the silence, and some came to keep it. I know which I am. The question that flag on its pole leaves hanging is only which of them this country will finally choose to be.

When the last drone powered down, my gaze returned to the flag in front of me. Unscathed. Still there. Unscathed the way something survives the storm, and unscathed the way something is left untouched because it is being watched and unreckoned with. Still there. Like us — not unscathed, never that; we bear our marks. But still there.