The words of the national anthem were written during the Battle of Baltimore on September 14, 1814. The song, of course, refers to the United States being the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” However, slavery was not abolished until December 6, 1865. This means that for 18,710 days, the national anthem contained one massive lie. Using an aproximation of the average speaking speed (about 160 words per minute), and the fact that the national anthem is 80 words long, the national anthem could be said for a grand total of 53,884,800 times before one of the central phrases became true. Now that of course ignores the inherent lack of freedom for African Americans in the south during the Jim Crow Era, and it only accounts for about 1/3 of the time between the writing of the lyrics and the passage of the various civil rights bills that made racial discrimination illegal. When using that metric, the tally comes up to about one hundred and sixty MILLION times that those words could be spoken before they became true.