It's easy to feel a little guilty if you stop and think about history on one of these patriotic days. I always feel a bit like Private Ryan at the end of the movie, riddled with an inferiority complex after English -teacher-turned-commanding-officer Tom Hank's dying words are "Make sure it was worth it..."
Isn't that just like an English teacher to do to someone? I know I try to curse my students with perpetual self-doubt all the time.
Anyway, my point is that as an American in the 21st Century, it's easy to suffer a kind of survivor's guilt. Is this petty, superficial, middle-class lifestyle really what countless men and women have died for in all those wars? Did people really sacrifice their blood so that I could go to shopping malls and read lots of comic books and Shakespeare...and Shakespeare comic books?
Was it really worth it?
And then...I think about the core dramatic conflict in the Lord of the Rings...
Even though all of Middle-earth is at stake in the epic, it seems to me that most of the dramatic conflict settles on the survival of the hobbits' beloved Shire. The survival of the Shire is, after all, what bookends the novel. We learn that Aragorn, as Strider, has been spending his exile protecting the Shire. Gandalf, a semi-supernatural being of immense power, loves the Shire, and seems equally invested in its survival.
But why?
Hobbits are pretty much wimpy, soft-in-the-middle, suburbanite isolationists. They have no concept of the epic battles being waged on their behalf in the outside world, and what little they do hear of it, they disregard completely. They are petty in every sense of the world, and good for nothing other than making tobacco (and by today's standards that alone makes them seem like they are already minions of Sauron). They live in their hobbit holes, read books, haggle over wares, drink, and smoke. They don't really do all that much else but live selfish little, epicurean lives.
So why is everyone so concerned about their survival? Other than the Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry, they have contributed nothing to the armies of Men. When the questing hobbits return, they discover that their neighbors have essentially sold themselves into slavery to the fallen Saruman. If they have no interest in being saved from the invading Orcs, why should anyone bother to save them? What are they good for? Why is saving the Shire even worth the trouble?
And that is precisely the question that troubles the villainous Saruman. He can't see the value of the Shire (other than the aforementioned smoking), and it perplexes him. There is something worthy in the Shire that others can recognize, but he cannot. Rather than inspiring a healthy curiosity, it inspires his wrath...and he directs his last and dying energies to destroy it. (Sound familiar?) And he would have succeeded if it weren't for those meddling kids...Frodo's friends, who have learned to defend themselves in their quest against greater evils.
The Shire doesn't allegorically represent modern man -- it is a little pocket of modern England somehow teleported into a prehistoric world. And it is recognized as good by the novels heroes, and as the real future of civilization. Either the villains can't appreciate that or they outwardly reject it. That is, despite his suspicion of technology and modernism, Tolkien did not condemn modern man as utterly unwholesome. Rather, he and his heroes saw modern Western civilization as something worth preserving, and even worth dying for despite its foibles.
And our America today has its fair share of sins. And we Americans today commit them. But there is still good in liberty and freedom; and there is something good in being able to pursue our own form of happiness within the limits of morality and law.
It doesn't make a difference if our happiness is worshipping according to our consciences, reading Shakespeare, or smoking pipeweed. Our founding fathers did not take a gamble on a particular object of happiness...they fought merely for the freedom to pursue it. It seems to baffle logic. If a people squanders their rights on baubles, one might say they should have that right taken away. They obviously aren't fit to have that freedom. That is the logic of the tyrant -- "I know what is best for you, so submit your will utterly to my command." That's why evil can't understand true freedom and it can't understand God, both of which say "You are free to pursue whatever good you desire, even if you choose what is not best."
Because the hobbits often choose poorly, people underestimate them. But the fact that hobbits can choose poorly is the sign of a healthy society. It also makes it all the more significant when they choose a greater good. Freedom serves to remind us of the potential to do good. A lack of freedom assumes that citizens are incapable of virtue, denying man his inherent nature.
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