On True
Patriotism
July 5, 2020
I’m an American.[1]
I’ve never been anything else. I was born in the United States. Although in my
youth I spent four different academic years abroad, I’ve never left the United
States without an intent to return. The United States of America has always
been my home.[2] I
will die here. My ashes will be buried here. I am a white American. My ethnic
roots are Irish, Danish, French, and English. I am a Protestant American. The
United Church of Christ or its Congregational predecessor is the only church to
which I have ever belonged. I am a cisgender heterosexual male American. I am
more of less able-bodied. I haven’t
served in the American military, but I would have had I not been classified
medically unqualified to serve. I’ve been an American for nearly seventy-four
years, that is, for my entire life. In all these ways I’m about as American as
a person can be.
Yet for all that the last
thing I wanted to do yesterday on the Fourth of July was celebrate my country.
Yes, I know. One of our founding documents
says that all men are created equal. We are supposed to be the land of the free
and the home of the brave, or at least we say that we are those things every
time we sing our national anthem. I know
our founders—white men all and many of them slave owners—saw this country as
the light on a hill, as a beacon for the whole world. I know that our greatest
president said that we have government of the people, by the people, and for
the people. I know that we became the arsenal of democracy and played a major
role in the defeat of the fascist, expansionist powers in World War II.[3]
I know that our Constitution guarantees us rights that so many other people in
the world don’t have.
I know all of that, and
today it all rings hollow. It all rings hollow because late in life I have
become more aware than ever that this country has spoken great words and failed
miserably in the task of living up to them. When the men who signed the
Declaration of Independence, supposedly on July 4, 1776, said that all men are
created equal they didn’t mean it. They meant that all white, landowning males
are created equal. Not women. Not white indentured servants. Most of all not
Black people many of whom these supposed pillars of democracy owned and treated
as chattel property. I know that those white men stole every square foot of
this nation from the indigenous peoples of the land. I know that they conducted
a campaign of genocide against those people, then confined those who survived
to reservations on land white people didn’t want. I know that the US government
violated every treaty it ever signed with a Native nation. I know that white
Americans worked to deprive Native people of their cultures by forcing their
children to speak English and become Christian. I know that we then made Indian
people into second-class citizens of the nation and mostly forgot about them
and their plight.
I know that it took a
brutal civil war to end race-based slavery in this country. I know that after
that war, by law in the south and by practice in the north, we deprived Black
Americans of their basic human rights—the right to vote, the right to a decent
education, decent medical care, and gainful employment equal to that of whites.
I know that we lynched them for the slightest perceived violation of the rules
of segregation or for no reason other than that they were Black. I know that
today we imprison Black people at a much higher rate than we imprison white
people. I know that today the Republican Party is still trying to restrict
Black Americans’ voting rights and that Black people still live disproportionately
with poor schools and poor medical care. I know that Black Americans live under
thoroughly racist social, economic, and legal structures that make true
equality impossible. They bear the brunt of police brutality, a fact of which
most of us white Americans are only now becoming aware.
I know that although some
states extended suffrage to women earlier men in this country didn’t give women
the right to vote nationwide until 1920. I know that this country refused to add
an equal rights amendment to the Constitution to protect women’s rights. I know
that today women do not get equal pay for equal work but get paid significantly
less for the same work than men do. I know that in many parts of the country a
woman’s right to control her own body is constantly under attack. I know that
only very recently have LGBTQ+ Americans begun to have their constitutional
rights recognized and protected by law.
I know that this country
has been imperialistic from the beginning. We took all of the land we now say
is ours from indigenous peoples. We fought imperialist wars of expansion with
Mexico and Spain. The war with Spain expanded the American empire far beyond
our North American borders, making it stretch from Puerto Rico to The
Philippines. I know that after World War
II we assumed the role of policeman of the world and as a bulwark against
Communism, convincing ourselves that the Communist threat was a lot greater
than it actually was. I know that we fought an immoral and massively
destructive war in Vietnam. After 9-11 we invaded Afghanistan. Our military is
still there almost twenty years later. We committed the war crime of starting
an illegal war of aggression in Iraq, thereby provoking Islamist extremists to
keep attacking us and giving them a most useful propaganda and recruitment
tool. I know that we spend an obscene proportion of our national wealth on the
military and that our economy would collapse if we didn’t.
I know that the wealthy
control our politics with their money. They put in office politicians, mostly
but not exclusively Republicans, who enact laws, especially tax laws, to the
benefit of the wealthy and the detriment of the rest of us. I know that the unequal
distribution of wealth in this country has reached unconscionable levels. A very small percentage of Americans
own an outrageous percentage of the nation’s wealth. I know that we continue to
insist that a corporation’s only real reason for existing is to return dividends
to its shareholders, thereby allowing them to engage in destructive labor,
environmental, and other practices.
I know that our constitutional
system of electing a president combined with the ignorance and bigotry of a
great many Americans has put into the White House a racist fascist. He
separates immigrant children from their parents and keeps them in cages. He
calls people demonstrating for justice a left-wing mob out to destroy the
country. He advocates retaining monuments to Confederate men who betrayed the
country and fought to preserve slavery. He calls white supremacists fine
people. He gives dog whistles to his racist political base and refused to
condemn white extremist violence. He pretends the coronavirus pandemic doesn’t
exist or at least that will go away on its own. He has grossly failed to
provide the leadership the country needs to cope with that pandemic.
I know that my country is
simply insane when it comes to guns. Americans own guns in unfathomable
numbers. They think owning a gun makes them safe when the research shows that
households without guns are safer than households with them. They think that by
owning an AR-17 they can defend themselves when the government comes after them
as these paranoid types think it will. Never mind that the government could
take them out without even trying hard it if wanted to no matter how many
AR-17s someone has. The Supreme Court has read an individual right to own guns
into the Second Amendment, thereby ignoring the plain wording of that
Amendment. Our federal government will not enact the most basic, sensible gun
control measures such as outlawing the possession of military style weapons and
requiring background checks for all gun purchases.
I know that we have done
a bang-up job of destroying the environment and putting life on earth at risk
with our environmentally destructive policies. The current presidential
administration has repealed many of the few modest environmental regulations we
had so that the Republicans’ wealthy backers can make even more money at the
public’s expense. We continue to burn massive amounts of carbon-based fuels
thereby contributing massively to global warming. There are I suppose other
unconscionable things you could add to this list of American outrages, but I
trust the point is made. This country is far from deserving to be celebrated
the way the myth of American greatness says it is.
So does it make any sense
to be in any way patriotic today? I think it does, but we must redefine the
word patriotic. We must not see patriotism as celebration. We must not see it
as reaffirmation of the American myth that we are the greatest country in the
world. We may be the strongest military power on earth. We may have the richest
economy on earth. Those things do not make a country great. They only make it
strong.
Rather than seeing
patriotism as celebration we must come to see it as repentance. Repentance is
of course a widely misunderstood concept. It doesn’t mean feeling sorry for
something. It doesn’t mean beating yourself up over things you can’t change. To
repent is to turn around. It is to reverse course. It is to work to make up for
wrongs you have done in the past. I suppose it does include feeling sorry or
even guilty for past wrongs, but a wrongdoer just sitting there beating up on
himself or herself does no one any good. It isn’t true repentance. Repentance
isn’t passive. To repent is to act to make what is wrong right and to cease
doing whatever it was that you did that was wrong in the first place.
Which of course makes
repentance a bit problematic in the case of the United States. There is so much
in our past that we can’t undo. We can’t undo the fact that the land we occupy
once belonged to other peoples. We can’t undo the fact that we stole it from
them. There is no place else for those of us who are not of Native descent to
go. The United States is well-established on its land. It’s not going to go
away. We can’t undo the past. We can’t go back and redo our history in a more
just way. We can’t undo the reality that racism is America’s original sin. We
can’t undo our history of slavery and Jim Crow. We can’t undo the past de facto
segregation in the north. We can’t un-fight the Mexican and Spanish wars. We
can’t uninvaded Vietnam, Afghanistan, or Iraq. We can’t undo the historical
truth that when our founders said that all men are created equal they didn’t
mean it. There is so much we can’t undo.
What we can and must do
is turn our future around. We can and must renounce and condemn racism and see
that its deleterious effects end. We can and must reject policies that benefit
only the wealthy, most of whom are white. We can and must make the tax
structure more equitable by assuring that those who benefit most from our institutions
pay a proper share of their cost. We can and must guarantee everyone’s voting
rights rather than work to restrict them for people politicians in power think
won’t vote for them. We can and we must hold police accountable when they do
wrong as we support them when they do right. We can bring the quality of
schools in poor places up to the quality of schools in rich places. We can stop
imposing harsher sentences for crimes on Black people than we do on white
people. We can dismantle the prison industrial complex. We can begin to protect
Mother Earth by switching to renewable energy sources and stopping to burn so
much carbon-based fuel. We can make corporations more environmentally
responsible by changing the law of what they are supposed to do. We can stop
putting environmentally damaging installations disproportionately in majority
Black areas. We can better guarantee the constitutional rights of women and
minorities rather the restrict them the way we do. We can guarantee that all
people but especially women and people of color receive equal pay for equal
work. We can pass meaningful gun control laws. We can create a universal single
payer health care system so that everyone in this country has access to quality
medical care. These things and so many other constructive actions aren’t easy,
but we can and must do them starting now.
Working to create a
better America is what patriotism must mean today, not buying into and
celebrating the idolatrous myth that we are the greatest nation on earth. We
aren’t. Even our neighbor Canada is a greater nation than we are in a many
ways. So are a great many other nations around the world that do a better job
of caring for all of their people and that spend a much smaller proportion of
their national wealth on the military. Patriotism today must mean working to
get our country to live up to what it has always said it is. We’ve got a long
way to go. Let’s get to work.
[1] It
would be good if we had some other adjective for people of the United States of
America. There are after all a lot of people in the Americas other than those of
us in the United States. Sadly we don’t. Somehow Unitedstatesian just doesn’t
work.
[2]
Yes, I know. United States is grammatically plural, but we use it as a singular
when referring to the country as a whole.
[3]
Although most Americans think we did, we didn’t play the major role in
defeating Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union did, but I won’t go into that
forgotten truth here.
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