All Flags Waving

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.

Surviving Piggington

Among my friends and colleagues, there is a waterfall of grief and despair going on.  I’ve spent the past few days wallowing in that deluge.

I haven’t gotten over it.  I won’t really ever get over it – and that’s a good thing.  There are going to be a lot of letters to write, a lot of booths to staff, and a lot of charitable donations to make, over the next four years. I need to hold onto a kernel of outrage.  I need to promise myself that I will not let this – any of this -- become the “new normal”.

But I also need to focus my energy and channel my wrath.  Talking though these election results with two ten-year-old girls has been hell.  But it has also been good for me.  It turns out that the hopeful, optimistic truths I dug deep (REALLY deep) to offer to two distraught children are my own truths, too. 

Thus, although this list is still growing and morphing, I’ll share a few of my thoughts.

1) This election mattered A LOT.  Like, really, really, really a lot.    There are many ways in which our new President can threaten human rights and the environment, in the U.S. and worldwide.  However, our government is set up such that the President is not a dictator.  There are people who can check his actions.  We, the people, can peacefully, effectively, fight back.  This is not un-American; it is, in fact, intensely American.  Just as we are a nation of immigrants, we are also a nation of rebels, and always have been.

2) Although the President is certainly a Very Big Deal, most of what we experience in our daily lives depends not on how we are treated by the person in the White House, but how we are treated by the people who live next door… and the kids on the playground…and the folks who ring up our groceries or change our oil… and the teachers in our schools and universities. Yes, there are bigots out there, and that is horrible, but we already knew they were out there.  They were out there last week, last month, last year.  And, with the possible exception of Ku Klux Klan members, no one is 100% bigoted, and no one is 100% unbigoted.  Including me.  So, even as I’m trying to fight sexism, racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the great big world, I’m going to try to avoid slapping labels on other people.  

3) Taking the high ground on being “informed”, like taking the high ground on being non-bigoted, feels crucial, yet shaky.  I have a PhD.  I read a lot.  I employ critical thinking skills.  But do I know everything about how to run this country?  Nope.  So while I’m going to do my damnedest to help counter misinformation in areas of my own expertise (“Anyone want to hear about climate change?  Anyone?  Anyone?”) I’m also going to try to keep learning.  And listening.

4) Even though right now it feels like we’re spiraling back to the Dark Ages, the choices of young voters and mock-voting children suggest otherwise.  Granted, I lead a privileged life.  I can’t speak for the experienced of LGBT or minority Americans.  But, heck, among locally reporting fifth-graders (in this red town in this red state), Hillary won all the electoral votes from “Narnia”, “Si-bear-ia”, and, indeed, all “states” and “territories” except for “Piggington”. 

Oh, Piggingtonites… I don’t think this is going to go any better for you than it is for the rest of us. 

The above photo depicts an exhaustive comparative literary analysis of the 1963 and 1980 editions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever.   My daughters report, after intense scrutiny, that the awkward amendments intended to make the anthropomorphic bunnies, cats, walruses, and worms less sexist, do not, in fact, make the book less sexist.  They have a few editorial suggestions.  They have a few suggestions about other things, too.  Lots of other things.

5) On the morning after Election Day, one of the twins asked me how old she has to be before she can run for President. 

Mauve

And the cool kids are… [wait for it… wait for it…]

…the people in the caps with a “B”! 

A picture of a pair of socks will also do.  But not, for heaven’s sake, a picture of a bird. After all, as everybody knows, the world is divided into “Us” and “Them” – and these distinctions are as immutable as the bad hotdogs at ballparks.

I grew up watching baseball, and loving every ponderous inning of spitting, swinging, and scratching.  Even though my interest waned with adolescence and distance from Shea Stadium, every time I see a ramped-up Facebook post about how Our Team is clobbering, trouncing, or flattening Their Team, I want to grin, kick back, and second-hand-enjoy the illogical bliss of these die-hard fans.  I want to -- but I stumble. Sometimes sports-hoopla seems like a too-potent reminder of the Hatfields-and-McCoys or Montagues-and-Capulets side of human nature. 

In elementary school, my compatriots and I enjoyed one day each spring known as Field Day.  Field Day was a competition featuring useful skills such as Everyone Gets Crushed by the Bigger Kids During Tug-o-War.  Somehow, our gym teachers persuaded us that this was a Really Big Deal.  We practiced for the event for several weeks, during which time every child in the school became increasingly rabid about who was Red and who was Blue. 

This was huge.  It put friendships on hold.  It put everything on hold.  By the eve of the Big Event, instead of actually running around and playing at recess, kids faced off against each other for screaming matches.  “Extra, extra, read all about it, Blue’s gonna win, and there’s no doubt about it!”  I have no idea why we all thought we were Depression-era newsboys, but we had good lungs.  REALLY good lungs.  Honestly, it’s surprising that the playground aides weren’t either homicidal or suicidal – although the one we all referred to as “Prune Face” may have required heavy medication.

Even at the time – as I participated in the screeching, and hunted through my third-grade wardrobe to make sure I wore clothes of the right color, and ONLY the right color – part of me knew that the whole thing was weird, trumped-up, and perhaps even a bit disturbing.  Sure, we didn’t metamorphose into the Crips and the Bloods, but some kids did get mean.  Why was I yelling at my own sister?  Well, ok, yelling at my sister was kind of normal.  But why was I antagonistic toward my best friend?  Why did this antipathy feel as it was somehow beyond my conscious control?

You say that folks all over Boston are partying in the streets because people whom they don’t even know are pretty good at whacking a little white ball with a stick?  Uh-huh. Yup.  I’ve delved a bit into psychology literature that elucidates just how shallow and war-mongering Homo sapiens can be, if given the chance to put on different-colored hats and shriek imprecations at one another. It ain’t pretty.

Of course, at some level, the feud of the Reds versus the Blues was merely competition.  Even as a kid I was plenty familiar with the idea that most games had winners and losers.  Sometimes the losers were bummed enough to sweep the whole Candyland board off the table and stalk away in a huff.  I wasn’t one of those kids; as the younger sibling, I had to be relatively ok with losing.  I lost at Facts in Five, I lost at chess, and I lost at bridge.  In fact, I was amused by the fact that bridge scores were officially – officially! – noted as “We” and “They”.  I always kind of wanted to be on the “We” team, but I knew it didn’t really make a difference.  It wasn’t forever.  It wasn’t real.  It was a label, but it didn’t define me.

That, of course, is the crux of the matter.  Competition is not intrinsically bad.  Differences are not bad.  Temporary labels aren’t bad.  Unchecked divisiveness, however, can fester. “We” and “They” or “Red” and “Blue” are not really the problem, so long as the alliances are fluid.  At the end of a bridge match (ok, fine, a “bridge rubber” – because, yes, it’s called a “rubber”), the teams dissolve.  At the end of Field Day, the Blues and the Reds melded together into mauve happiness.  In the Real World, however, the divisions run deeper.  The Reds and the Blues keep the battlements up.  In the real world, there are too many ways in which our “We and They” mentality can take deeper root. 

This frequently occurs – to pick an example, oh, totally at random -- in Congress.

Back when the entire US government ground to a globally embarrassing halt a few weeks back, I struggled to explain the phenomenon to the kids.  “The people we elected to run the country can’t agree about how much money to spend on what.  And… they aren’t playing nicely.  They aren’t listening.  They aren’t being reasonable.” I then proceeded to explain my own position on the issues at hand – which, given the other folks with whom we eat dinner in our liberal-intellectual no-it’s-not-a-commune community, represented not merely my opinion, but Our Opinion.  Yes, kids, this is what the Good Team thinks!  Um… yeah.  I found myself wondering, a bit uncomfortably, how well I would do, if tasked with “playing nicely” with the other team, a.k.a. Them.

Don’t get me wrong -- I realize that in politics, the divisions are not arbitrary, as they are in grade-school sporting events (or grownup sporting events – admit it, you hat-wearing people).  The differences are ideological.  They are tremendously important. We don’t need to – and indeed shouldn’t -- water down our opinions or our moral choices.  But we do need to alter the mentality with which they are examined and discussed.

I’m not going to give a rundown on all my core beliefs, economic frustrations, and ideas about governance in this blog post.  I’d like a few readers to stay awake, and I have so many years of potential blog post ahead of me (aren’t you EXCITED!?).  However, I’ll assert that I’ve thought these ideas and beliefs through pretty carefully.  I’m a scientist, so I try not to swallow statistics without understanding them, or spout facts without checking them.  Nonetheless, I can’t pretend that there is no emotional component involved, when it comes to choosing sides in our politically polarized nation.  I can’t pretend that I don’t listen a trace more carefully when my friends are sharing their thoughts, as opposed to when Fox News is blaring in the background at an airport terminal.  And I’ve noticed that if my team occasionally makes a factual or strategic error, I write it off as just that – an error.  Fix it, apologize, and move on.  But I tend to perceive the errors perpetrated by Them as somehow more intentional and more malevolent.  “They” are not just wrong; “They” are conniving, disingenuous, manipulative, evil. 

“Blue’s gonna win, and there’s no doubt about it!”

The weird thing is, this kind of thinking is hard to recover from, even in the face of direct evidence to the contrary.  I can meet individuals with social, political, or religious ideologies very different from my own, and I can LIKE these people.  I can recognize that, as individuals, they do not actually want children to go hungry, old ladies to go without their arthritis medication, or school roofs to cave in – even if they do not support the programs that I feel would alleviate these problems.  In the same vein, I’m pretty sure that such individuals recognize that I (as a human-type-person whom they know) don’t actually support the US being destroyed by terrorists or overtaken by a totalitarian regime, even if I don’t always agree with the way in which our nation attempts to avoid such dreadfulness.  So far, so good, on an individual basis.  But collectively, we view each other with suspicion, at best – and, at worse, with vituperative animosity. We draw the lines, and we don’t cross them.  Us.  Them.

I’m both fascinated and appalled by how we self-assort, at every level of life, and according to varied metrics.  Gender, race, sexual orientation, region or nation of origin, level of education, voting habits, reading habits, employment, breakfast beverage, baseball cap design – which cues and clues am I using, I wonder?  And which (oh, horrors) are my kids using?

Kids think in pure terms.  Good. Bad.  No middle ground.  If they know that alcohol is Bad and that bike helmets are Good, they will stare in horror at an adult who is sipping a glass of wine or briefly rolling helmetless in his own driveway.  They may even abjectly embarrass their parents by pointing and loudly decrying these naughty, naughty grownups.  We adults do a lot of preaching about Right and Wrong, but we need to work on our Shades of Gray speech, too.  While we’re at it, we could work on our Us and Them speech, too.  Our Winners and Losers speech.  Our Red and Blue speech.  Field Day was fun, wasn’t it, kids?  Now how about some dull lecturing!

Nobody tried for that sort of thrilling follow-through after Field Day 1979.  But it now strikes me that this may be an area in which we actually are making progress, for all that our electoral maps scream otherwise.  That is, I hear a lot of grousing about how our kids aren’t being trained to be competitive enough.  This probably means we’re doing a fantastic job, collectively, of ensuring fewer government shutdowns in the year 2048.  Not competitive enough?  Sure, Field Day would not have been as much fun, if we hadn’t cared – obsessively – about who won.  But it might have been even better, if (perhaps after the last kid had been rescued, gasping, from the tug-o-war melee) our teachers had talked to us a bit about teamwork, and competition, and cooperation, and the whole fuzzy mess that lies between the extremes.  

These days, teachers and coaches are doing just that.  They are letting kids know that sometimes the Reds need to listen to the Blues, and vice versa. Sometimes one team will win.  Sometimes, everyone wins.  So maybe what we need now is a little upward mobility in this lesson.   Listen up, grownups!  Sometimes the team with the “B” on their caps will win.  Sometimes one view will be proven correct -- but the process needn’t involve rancor, bloodshed, National Park Service websites with bleak “we are closed” messages, or the cancellation of an entire season of federally-funded Antarctic research.  Sometimes, after all the civil, reasonable words have been spoken, everyone will end up a little less Red, a little less Blue, and a little more mauve. 

All of Boston is partying in the streets because a bunch of tight-white-trousered guys they don’t know won a game?  Well… ok.  I would never dump the cash necessary to attend a World Series game – or even to buy the hat – but were I in Boston, I’d probably be cheering just a little bit, too.  After all, Boston (once, long ago) was MY town.  Baseball (once, even longer ago, in shining childhood Shea Stadium hours I shared with my dad) was MY game.  True, sometimes the stakes in Real Life are too high for us to assort ourselves by the lettering on our caps.  But at other times – so long as we can admit that it makes no sense, and so long as nothing is too irredeemably serious -- there can be joy in a little game of Us and Them. 

We just need to know the difference.

Play ball, America.  Play ball.