Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world who is now the mayor of the embattled city of Kyiv, Urkaine, was on cable news last week. He was speaking in broken Rocky Balboa English, sending a message to the world.

“Freedom,” he said, “requires unity.”

Here then might be just the clarion call to finally unify our polarized, distracted country if we let it, something that matters more than our petty COVID complaints and our suddenly-irrelevant political arguments with each other.

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Defend freedom with us, asked Vitali. If it’s worth our lives, it’s worth a little of your time and attention as well.

The global gathering of support behind Ukraine restores my faith that the world can make sense, and does make sense. It’s as if we all woke up from a long nightmare of self-absorption to remember the collective decency we’re specially called to in this country.

We’re beginning to remember that the world’s people still yearning to breathe free, they need us like air. They need the idea of America, as well as our arsenal of democracy.

Defending human freedom is our peculiar American charge, we‘re beginning to remember, first laid upon our heads by Thomas Jefferson.

“And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and liberties of Europe,” he wrote rather presciently in a letter to John Adams, “this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them.”

This country. That means us, me and you. Now.

Freedom requires unity.

I think Vitali Klitschko would very much like the small park I used to frequent in Washington D.C.

Dedicated to the long, worldwide struggle for freedom, an elevated walkway in the park used to take me past a reproduction of the Statue of Freedom, which caps the dome of the United States Capitol, then across stones from the Warsaw Ghetto, on by a casting of a South African ballot box, past a toppled statue of Lenin and over to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birmingham, Ala., jail cell door. Also along the walk you’d see a replica of the Goddess of Democracy, originally constructed for the Tiananmen Square protests in China, and finally come face to face with the largest collection of Berlin Wall pieces displayed outside of Germany.

I used to go sit in Freedom Park sometimes and close my eyes and imagine a winged lady liberty, like that one on those beautiful Mercury dimes struck from late 1916 to 1945. And I’d imagine her floating around Thomas Paine as he wrote “Common Sense” on that log at Valley Forge, and then swirling over to France for the revolution there but recoiling in horror from the dark turns it took. She would watch over the Black soldiers who fought in the Civil War, I imagined, march in with the GIs of Normandy as they liberated France, then rollerskate with Vaclav Havel in the halls of the Prague castle after he defeated Communism in Czechoslovakia without firing a shot.

I used to wonder, on sunny days, where she would fly off to next. And now we know: She has sailed headstrong into Ukraine to sit by Volodymyr Zelensky’s side.

Freedom requires unity. Of memory as well as us.

Given our auspicious history of defending freedoms, I’m thinking now we have demanded too little of ourselves in recent years.

“We can be more generous, disciplined, empathetic and morally serious,” wrote commentator Jennifer Rubin recently. “The age of nonsensical cultural meme-creation, fear-mongering and racial resentment must end. We need to be worthy of Ukrainians’ respect.”

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Ukraine is the great clarifier for those of us who are lucky enough to live in the country we do.

Freedom is absolutely not free, we can now see every day in Ukraine in too vivid pictures of children’s nurseries and maternity hospitals blown to smithereens. It’s also fragile as hell. It can disappear in the blink of an eye. It requires vigilance, participation, sacrifice.

And freedom requires unity.

Unity with our brothers and sisters around the world fighting to keep their democracies, but with our neighbors up the street as well. If Ukrainians are willing to fight to the death for the very existence of their country, then maybe we in this country can take a minute to talk to our ideological opposites without demonizing them. Putin and the freedom killers, they are the demons. Repression, that is our enemy. Cruelty is our enemy. We are not each other’s enemy. That truth is suddenly as clear as the sound of the chimes of freedom flashing.

“If Ukrainians are willing to assemble Molotov cocktails and die for their country, maybe Americans can bestir themselves to vote —” wrote Rubin “and insist that every legal voter gets access to the polls and every ballot gets counted. American voters might even rethink their priorities, putting defense of democracy at the top.”

Do this for me. Go listen to a choir on YouTube sing the last four minutes of “The Testament of Freedom” by Randall Thompson, who set Jefferson’s words to music during the second world war. I once randomly walked in on a youth choir’s rehearsal of the piece in the sacred space of the National Cathedral, and I’m not sure I’ve been the same person since. 

I guarantee the last few stanzas when the whole choir erupts in “Liberty! Liberty! Liberty!” will make you shiver with Americanism. 

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Then after that, go out and do something worthy of a Ukrainian. Go talk to that neighbor you disagree with. Go give some time or money to humanitarian relief for Ukraine. Go call your Congress member and ask them to work across the aisle to support Ukraine and freedom around the world, and at home. Call up a soldier and thank her for her service. Find an immigrant and make him feel at home. 

Freedom requires action. Freedom requires unity.

Just ask Vitali.