A couple of months ago, I was informed that
at sixth grade graduation, one of my daughters (and one of her male classmates)
would be given special awards by the American Legion. These were purportedly being bestowed upon
the children who best embodied the all-American values of honor, service,
leadership, scholarship, courage, and patriotism.
Setting aside the pomposity of assuming
that an eleven-year-old can embody any of the above values… patriotism?
I don’t use that word much. My circle of friends – that is, the small and
non-representative sample of Americans (and the even smaller and less
representative sample of Not Americans) who are willing to hang out with me -- aren’t
prone to using that word, either.
To me, and I suspect to many of my
politically self-identified clan, “patriotism” brings to mind the kind of
bellowing nationalism that supports bombing places without having any inkling
of where they are on a map. This form of
patriotism believes that walls are great (GREAT!) -- and that bigger walls are
greater. It glorifies mindless, flag-waving,
my-country-right-or-wrong bravado coupled with my-bald-eagle-is-gonna-crap-on-your-solar-panels
aggression.
Given that this wasn’t exactly the feeling
I wanted to conjure when telling my kid about her upcoming honor, I tried to
draw upon the Merriam Webster definition, which told me that “patriotism” means
“love for or devotion to one's country”.
Although I’m not certain whether my child
is patriotic, she’s not lacking in perception.
At eleven, children already know what social groupings they belong
to. They understand nuance and
connotation. My daughter was thrilled
that she was going to be recognized, but she also was not immune to
cynicism. She noted, “Well, I guess at
least it’s not too racist, because [the other kid getting the award] is Black.”
Yeah.
She listens to adult conversations.
She knows. She is sadly aware
that We Who Do Not Generally Refer to Ourselves as Patriotic have got a lot of
guilt about being Americans. I won’t
argue with that; most of that guilt, born of privilege, violence, discrimination,
hatred, greed, has been thoroughly earned by this nation. It’s high season for agonizing over what it
means to be an American. I can’t judge anyone for wallowing, because I’ve been
wallowing too. And I’ve been trying to
figure out just how I should represent my country – their country – to my kids.
In order to understand how I feel about
America, I have to go back a little bit.
Okay, a lot.
In February, 1997, I was living between the
villages of Riversdale and Troja, in rural Jamaica – a place that is almost
entirely unlike the reggae-and-beaches Jamaica that the tourism industry wants
you to buy into. I had been there for
two years. During those two years, I’d
learned a lot of fascinating things, such as how to open a green coconut with a
machete, how to roast a breadfruit, and how to conjugate verbs in a language
that doesn’t officially exist. I’d also,
finally, begun to have an inkling about how to own my Americanness – with all
the shame, pride, beauty, ugliness, shallowness, and complexity interwoven into
that endeavor.
When I joined the Peace Corps, right after
college, my sense of commitment to patriotically serving my nation was slim, at
best. The idea that I could adequately
“represent” America seemed laughable. I
considered myself a highly atypical member of the American genre. American culture? What was it, even? I barely watched TV or movies, I’d never seen
more than a fleeting few minutes of a football game, and I’d never even eaten a
Big Mac, a Whopper, or Kentucky Fried Anything.
I told myself that I didn’t want to join
the Peace Corp to be an ambassador of American-ness; I just wanted to help
people. I knew I wanted to step outside
the bubble of advantage that I’d floated around in for all of my life. And, more selfishly, I wanted to have some
adventures before I got down to the presumably boring business of figuring out
what I really wanted to be when I grew up.
The Peace Corps, one of the dreams of JFK,
was created with lofty ideals. It was
never just about providing free teacher-training or agricultural aid or
healthcare services in the developing world.
Indeed, digging irrigation ditches is simple compared to the far more
daunting second task of the Peace Corps: Not Being An Asshole.
The official paperwork describes it in
different words, but that’s basically it.
That’s your second task. American
volunteers, can you represent our culture in a way that doesn’t totally
suck? Can you take on the challenge of
being the only American that an entire community has ever met, and not screw
that up? While you’re at it, can you
complete the actual project assigned to you?
It may or may not involve breadfruit.
I can’t overemphasize just how clueless I
was, and how unprepared, with my 22 years of sheltered white-girl wisdom, my
optimistic outlook, and my brand new degree from Harvard.
I was sent to a country that exists in
literal proximity to the United States, but I’m not sure that made much
difference. All nations of the world,
these days, live in figurative proximity to us.
We cast our shadow everywhere. It’s
a big, dense shadow of past slavery and current imperialism. That’s a lot to try to discuss while sitting
on a crumbling concrete wall with a man who does not own shoes, speaks a creole
that has never been fully legitimized as a written language, and wants to have
a little chat with you about the Middle Passage.
That conversation on that wall, stretched
across two and a half years, was my experience of the second task of the Peace
Corps. It wrung me out and left me to
flap in the sunshine like all the laundry I hand-washed in rainwater from my
roof: imperfect, fraying at the edges perhaps, but nonetheless cleaner.
There were days when I tried to describe snow
to curious friends who had never felt the mercury drop below 60F. There were days when children ran gentle
fingers up my bare arms, and exclaimed that my skin felt normal, human, despite
its peculiar appearance. There was the
point in linguistic and cultural immersion when I could sometimes get the
joke. There were days when the cloud of anger
regarding whom I represented felt palpable.
There was a slow, slow mental sorting of
what others might think it meant to be American, what I used to think it meant,
and what I actually wanted it to mean. There
was the day when I looked at my own arm among a line of arms, strap-hanging on
a densely packed bus, and saw it as freakish and alien in its paleness. There was the day when an elderly man looked
down at me in the bottom of the pit where I was laboring at the village school,
and remarked, laughing, that white girls are really good at digging outhouses. He shared some limeade with me, sweet and
sour.
Yeah, that’s the second task. And then there’s the third task of the Peace
Corp: spending the rest of your life talking about it.
I solemnly promised the federal government
that in exchange for sending me off to figure out my American-ness, I’d come
back and let everyone else know how all that went for me. By definition, this has to be done a little
at a time, and it has to be done without coming across as a boring,
self-aggrandizing git. Even taking that
into account, I’ve been a bit of a slacker.
But if I have failed to explain what I’ve learned to anyone else, I
should at least explain it to my own children.
So, what does patriotism mean to me,
anyhow?
Parenting gives me additional perspective
that I certainly didn’t have when I set off, starry-eyed, for Jamaica, and
still didn’t quite have when I returned, two years older and maybe-or-maybe-not
wiser. What parenting taught me is that
it’s possible to think my kids are amazing, to enjoy their quirks and their
strengths, and even to feel affectionate about many of their weaknesses, while
still being very much aware that they are flawed. I do not think that they are always
right. I do not think that all their
actions are defensible, or that they have nothing to learn, or that they can do
no wrong. I certainly do not think that
they are intrinsically superior to other children.
I do not think any of those things about my
country, either.
When viewed through this lens, patriotism
feels both obvious and easy to me. Yes,
of course I love my country. I care about
it deeply and passionately, which is why I am so desperate to help it grow in
the right directions, and to avoid pitfalls ranging from the relatively petty
(crappy mass transit, terrible fast food) to the tragic. I won’t list the tragic. You already know.
So, yes, I’m patriotic. And, yes, maybe my kids – the one who was
honored by the American Legion and the one who wasn’t – are learning to be, and
NEED to be patriotic too. If there’s one
thing that I should learn from the American Legion, from the Fourth of July,
and from the First, Second, and Third tasks of the Peace Corps, it’s that patriotism
is something I need to DO rather than just BE.
If I’m wringing my hands and protesting
that golly gee, I’M not racist/ sexist /xenophobic /homophobic /intolerant /intolerable,
then I’m doing it wrong – because of course I’m all those things, or have been,
or might be, in one way or another. The
trick is to actively try to be LESS of those things. I might not get it right, but I can get it
less wrong. If I’m rolling up my metaphorical or actual sleeves and actively
seeking cures, improvements, protections, and changes – and if I’m teaching my
kids to do the same -- then we’re at least making an honest attempt to put patriotism
into action.
I don’t claim to have succeeded at this, or
even made much of a dent. But for today,
Independence Day, I’ll first deal with several days’ worth of dirty dishes: curry,
pasta, chipotle, quinoa, pancakes – an immigrant pastiche of flavors. I’ll hang my laundry to flap rainbow-colored
in a sunburn-hot breeze. I’ll take a
bike ride with my family, on our two tandems, to a locally-owned sandwich place. An older guy will sing, with creditable
accuracy, “Bicycle Built for Two,” and a smiling young man with Down Syndrome
will high-five me. The kid who is a
model of honor, service, leadership, scholarship, courage, and patriotism will
decide that it’s the perfect time to attach a stick and a napkin to her shoe in
order to sail it across a large puddle, and no one will bat an eye. I will
contemplate the ease and acceptance with which I am granted the privilege of
moving through my community and my world.
We’ll do a bit of gardening. We’ll talk about what it means to be
pot-bound – roots turned inward until, even if granted new room for growth and
enrichment, none can occur. The kids are
old enough for metaphors. For irony. For truth.
When all that’s done, I’ll finish this
essay, write another letter to my Senators, and donate to a couple of
charitable organizations that epitomize caring about our future, our fellow
humans, the world, and our nation’s place in that world.
It’s not enough, of course. I’ll keep looking for more that I can do. I don’t want to become pot-bound. I don’t want
my nation to become pot-bound, either. I want to keep working on the Third Task. I want, ultimately, to try to earn my
own patriotism.
