For some unknown reason I woke up one recent morning humming the tune to our national anthem.

Several years ago, while visiting friends in Baltimore, Maryland, I visited Fort McHenry during what was the 100th anniversary year of Francis Scott Key’s 1814 poem, “The Defense of Fort M’Henry,” that would later become known as “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

While mulling over the words to the first verse (the remaining three verses are rarely performed), I noticed, to my surprise, that the final phrase is in the form of a question and not a statement of fact.

“O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?”

For the author it was, in fact, an open question all through the night until his hope was verified – “by the dawn’s early light.”

Very few would dispute that our country today finds itself in an era of hyperpartisanship and political anxiety and anger. Some tend to see their political opponents in highly critical terms such as “dangerous,” “misguided” or even “evil.” For a country that survived a civil war and then, one century later, a contentious but much-needed civil rights struggle, the assassination of three prominent political icons and the divisive war in Vietnam, today is not our lowest point. But it is a very dangerous and threatening time nonetheless.

External threats abound: Vladimir Putin’s brutal and unprovoked war against Ukraine; Iran’s suppression of women along with its rapid development of nuclear weapons; North Korea, already a nuclear power, lobbing missiles over Japan and constantly threatening its neighbor to the south, to mention only three. And this leaves out the existential threat of global climate change – Hurricane Fiona recently just missed us and Hurricane Ian hit Florida as a near-Category 5 storm.

Is this not the time to come together in an attempt to deal with these and countless other vexing challenges? With midterm elections only a fortnight away and the general election of 2024 on the near horizon, I would propose the following few modest suggestions:

• Reject any candidate who will not clearly and without reservation state that (s)he will accept the result of their election, win or lose.

• Reject any candidate who cannot clearly state that, whether or not they voted for him, Joseph Biden is currently our lawfully elected president.

• Reject any candidate who cannot clearly state that Jan. 6, 2021, represented an attempt by some to prevent the constitutional process of naming a new president.

• Reject any candidate who cannot state clearly and support the widely held notion that no person is above the law.

• And, finally, search for candidates who have forward-looking agendas and can clearly state how they will try to make our country and the world safer and better, especially for our children and their children.

If we can all do these things, Francis Scott Key’s question will be answered in the affirmative, yet again, and our nation will continue to be, with all its flaws and imperfections, a beacon of hope in a troubled world.

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