Reading a New Yorker article about the history of patriotism was both sad and enlightening. Sad for where we've been and where we are again, but enlightening with the history line of the definition of the idea of patriotism in the world and in America.
The first paragraph connected with its description of the author's youth, which mirrored mine. Coming from a small town and only five years younger than the author, I could relate. One Black family lived in our town, with two kids younger than me, and the only immigrant, Herman, being from Norway and coming to us in second grade, was able to integrate easily, especially with his ability to teach us swear words in a new language.
By high school, I was a bit more knowledgeable about the world but nothing like today's youth. Debating mixed marriages (for) and writing about Vietnam (against) made me think I was worldly. Believing Blacks were all decent people who had been wronged, I went to college believing I knew what was what. It was only when I started working at the snack bar there and seeing the Black players on the basketball team, budging in line that I came to a more nuanced thought, duh - there were entitled humans of all colors.
When I started teaching, I wanted a wider view of the world for my students, so the poetry unit had Emerson (white and elitist), Dickinson (white woman), Langston Hughes (Black man) and Carl Sandburg (white and of the people, from the bread basket land of America). I know. Not much, but me, coming from a small town, and not really having thought of myself as an English major, yet now a teacher of English, I was doing my best.
Over the years I became more and more liberal. Always angry at the place of women in a man's world and over of the African-Americans's waves of violence against them, I also came to understand the white man's history we'd been taught was certainly not how the native Americans and Blacks saw white Americans. As for immigrants, I was taught that America was the melting pot of the world, and that, that I have hung on to. How that idea has been turned on its head, well, it has, so sadly.
With Trump, unfortunately, I came to reject so much that was a part of my childhood, the pledge of Allegiance, the waving of the flag, the belief in government. (Too) often I hear myself blaming "old white men and the women who love them," going so far as saying they must die, oh, not by murder but by the dying out of a generation so their beliefs can die with them.
I guess I could look at that idea as a positive thought, that the ills of our society could die out with the old, but will they, though? Again, sad to say, not now, not in the time of the Trump. He has brought out, and allowed to grow, the worst of what America has been and still is.
I fly the Juneteenth flag, rejecting the flag that Trump has hugged and kissed, even while knowing it was that flag that my mother and father gave their youth to fighting and serving in WWII. I also made a sign at the beginning of Trump's second term and put it at the road begging us to be better, and I will keep both until we have righted ourselves.
Do I love America? Not now, not while we allow the government to do so much damage here at home and abroad. Am I patriotic? In my own way, you bet. America was founded on ideals that we haven't met fully, but they're still there.
I hope.
