Inside Out: Lockdown? Not for me on Patriot’s Day
The ironies cascaded through my mind as I headed north to Lexington and Concord on April 19, the anniversary of the skirmishes in 1775 when “embattled farmers stood and fired the shot heard ‘round the world,” as Mr. Emerson put it.
My wife thought I was crazy to make a detour on my solo trip to points much further west and north. But for all the years since elementary school that I’d longed to see the places where American militia and British regulars first exchanged sustained fire, I could only imagine what the green at Lexington and the bridge at Concord looked like.
With some time on my hands, and well aware how fast time goes by and chances are lost, I decided I was going, Boston Marathon bombing lockdown or not.
Lexington, my first stop, is a couple of towns northwest of Watertown, where the night before my trip police and the Tsarnaev brothers had engaged in a shootout, leaving Tamerlan dead and Dzhokhar on the run. Depending on where and when you got your news, the “authorities” — a term I’ve always detested as toxic jargon — had “asked” or “ordered” businesses to stay closed and people to stay off the streets, not only in Watertown and several towns to its east but in Boston proper.
By what authority can police shut down a swath of suburbs, short of a declaration of monumental emergencies and martial law? But if this was an order, I doubt the “authorities” could win that one in any court with reasonable judges on the bench (and that excludes that court with Thomas, Alito and Scalia aboard).
My wife thought the authorities would never let me enter Lexington. I doubted that. How, short of shutting down all roads, can you stop people from jumping in their cars and trucks and going about their business? Without a declaration of martial law, it can’t be done except maybe in North Korea.
As I expected, Lexington was open for business and bustling. After all, it was Patriot’s Day — a very big deal in Massachusetts and especially in Lexington and Concord, drawing tourists from all over. Interestingly, it was the local businesses that were open. The corporate outlets — the Starbucks and Panera — were closed. Starbucks had a cute handwritten note in the window saying they were closed out of concern for their customers’ and employees’ safety.
Sam Adams would have barfed and I thought of Benito Mussolini’s alleged comment that “facism” should be called “corporatism” because it blossoms with the merger of corporate and government power. I fear we’re well down that road.
I’m no radical. Like the patriots of 1775, who just wanted Parliament to leave them alone to run their own affairs as Parliament had done for more than a century, I’m really a conservative who likes the way things are, or at least used to be, back when Republicans signed sweeping environmental regulations and, for all the tough talk, opened the door to adversaries like China.
So I actually went on defense when a punky-looking young college-age couple — with tattoos, nose and ear rings, and spiky pink hair — started complaining to me about the heavy police presence at Lexington’s Battle Green. The cops weren’t allowing anybody to cross the street and stroll that triangle of hallowed ground, which wasn’t a big deal because you could still see it just fine and the best stuff, like Buckman’s Tavern, where the militia waited for the regulars to arrive, was on the open side of the street.
“It really says something about this country that you can’t go on the Battle Green because the police won’t let you,” the young man said.
“It just isn’t right,” the girl said. “We came a long way.”
Trying to ignore that tinge of entitlement, I agreed, admitting it was ironic the cops were keeping citizens off the green. But the cops were there, I added, not because of the lockdown. They were bracing for a big demonstration in support of gun-control legislation then pending against all odds in Congress. Pro-gun people had vowed to hold a counter-demonstration and the police were trying to keep a lid on things.
Some pro-gun people were there, in fact, milling around with no opponents to bait. I overhead one, a rather grungy looking man, reading an historic marker memorializing a fallen American and telling a boy carrying a flag whom I took to be his son: “Here’s where Americans first started fighting for their rights …”
I sensed there was an unspoken qualifier: “ … by using their weapons against their enemies,” and that troubled me, as correct as it might have been. I had the feeling he was indoctrinating the boy with the idea that guns are for shooting authorities — government people, soldiers, police — when they start trampling on one’s rights.
The college kids shrugged. “So this place was all about freedom and because of the police we can’t go walk on the green. That’s a bad scene. It just seems wrong.”
What a jumble it was all getting to be in my head. I think things were a lot clearer for those brave farmers who stood their ground as the British regulars formed and took aim at them. If we ever reach a stage again at which citizens must fight or die, I wonder if we’ll live up to the challenge and what we will be fighting for.
My trip was a memorable detour. I no longer have to imagine Lexington or Concord or the North Bridge. It’s really there, rebuilt in the 1950s to look like the one that “arched the flood” in 1775. The gentle Concord River still swells with the spring freshet as it ambles through a great shallow bowl of greening fields.
I hope those punky college kids got there, too, but I didn’t see them.
