What is July 4 to the ambivalent liberal?

Messy thoughts about community, country, and who counts

Although my family eventually found its way to the Mennonite Church, I myself was baptized by my father 40 years ago in a fundamentalist church. I don't know whether it was the church itself or my extended family's version of it that created a palpable sense — fear — of hell and sin in every corner of life, but I've come lately to realize that my adult brain is still very much stuck in those grooves. It's been a long time since I was truly a church-goer: I am agnostic these days, carrying no real affinity for or antipathy toward religion. I simply don't know the answer to these big questions, won't ever know in this realm, and so mostly don't bother with them. But I recognize a sort of fundamentalist bent in my own makeup, even as I try to resist that tendency.

In other news: It's July 4. 

That fundamentalist impulse that leads me to see myself, even now, mostly in terms of what's wrong with me — my innate selfishness and laziness — also leads me to tend to default toward seeing my country in terms of sin. When Independence Day comes around, I don't think so much about freedom and USA! USA! Instead, I tend to think about whom we grant and share a sense of liberty and self-determination, and those we don't.

And anyway, pride is a sin, and what is this day but a giant display of balls-to-the-wall, ostentatious pride?

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Last week, I attended a film festival in my community. It was mostly documentaries, and a lot of them focused either on minority experiences, the fallout from the Trump Administration, or some combination of the two. It sounds like a drag, but honestly it was enlightening, and the best films tackled their topics with real creativity and flair.

One film that has stuck in my head in the days since was ᏓᏗᏬᏂᏏ (WE WILL SPEAK). I'll explain it from my Letterboxd review:

Until just a few decades ago, the United States routinely took Native American children from their homes and put them in boarding schools to learn English and be more like white people. "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man," said Captain Richard Henry Pratt. The result? English came to mostly replace indigenous languages among the survivors. That may be changing among Cherokee people, thanks to young folks looking to reclaim their identity. "If we lose our language, who are we?" one participant asks. This film documents efforts to revive the language for future generations — adults trying to learn Cherokee relatively late in life while spearheading immersion efforts for young kids. It's a way of keeping the culture alive, but it also has a spiritual dimension. "There's a day when we'll cross over, see our grandparents," says one activist. "It's important we can talk to them. Otherwise, they won't know who we are."

The documentary was paired with a short film, SEED WARRIORS, about a small group of Pawnee who even now seek to preserve and cultivate the last corn seeds taken by the tribe when it was driven off its land in Nebraska in the 1800s. They’re still working to repair the damage.

America did that to them. Kind of hard to feel pride about that.

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But also: People and countries are more complicated than that, aren’t they?

The closest I've come to unmitigated patriotism in my lifetime was in the days after 9/11. A few weeks after the attacks, I got in my car and drove cross-country from Kansas to New York, stopping along the way to talk to people, and ultimately to see and smell the ruins for myself. My  time with the Mennonites had made me fervently pacifist, but at that moment I did not feel terribly pacifist. I wanted somebody to pay. 

That's not why I'm telling you this story though. While I was in New York, some friends of mine took me to visit some friends of theirs, a Puerto Rican family whose daughter was dying of cancer. They made me coffee with lime, and shared their story of the attacks. It was beyond generous, and I've never forgotten that moment. That trip, that evening, made me feel on a visceral level something I knew in my head but had never really fully absorbed: That America was bigger than my experience of it, and that there were more ways of being American than I knew. I wanted to experience, and know, more of it.

Was that patriotism? I don't know. I'm uncomfortable even now with that word. So let's just say it made me more appreciative of what's good in this country.

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All of this is complicated by the fact that in our country right now the biggest flag-wavers in our country seem to be — how to phrase this — monstrous dicks. They're led by an obvious charlatan, liar and thief who was once photographed hugging a flag, a smarmy smile on his face. 

I don't well up with pride when I see an American flag. I also don't want to let those guys have exclusive custody of it, lest they use it as a totem — something like the Ark in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK — to enhance their own power. I'm not an idiot: Most Americans think patriotism is good, and a political movement is probably not going to be successful if its adherents express the kind of ambivalence I'm expressing right now.

Tom Nichols is perhaps better at making the right kind of distinctions here. "Patriotism, unlike its ugly half brother, nationalism, is rooted in optimism and confidence," he writes. "Nationalism is a sour inferiority complex, a sullen attachment to blood-and-soil fantasies that is always looking abroad with insecurity and even hatred." That sounds closer to patriotism as I might want to practice it. Then again, I'm suspicious of optimism and confidence, because it can — has — curdle into hubris and a willingness to do great harm. I'm thinking here of the Iraq War. And Captain Pratt. He had no shortage of optimism and confidence.

Maybe that's just the fundamentalism talking again. 

Related: I think American democracy is deeply flawed. But I suspect it's better than the alternatives on offer right now. I think those alternatives are bad for people, bad for the country, and I want better for this country and its people.

Is that patriotism? I don't know. Maybe it's just pragmatism. Or self-preservation.

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My mother died on July 4. A decade ago today, in fact. So the day has weird associations for me anyway, and will for the rest of my life. I already didn't have much tendency to go to cookouts and set off fireworks. Now I usually spend the day at home with family, quietly. I'll probably get some reading done today. 

Where I end up — for now, is this. I love my community and want to celebrate it. And that community is part of a state and a nation that, at the end of the day, is my home. I will not be a native to any other land. So I want and hope the work I do, the words I write, contribute in some infinitesimally small way to making it all just a little better. But I don't believe in American Exceptionalism: We're neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad, though this country is exceptionally powerful so if you feel the good you really feel the good and if you feel the bad, you really feel the bad.

Me: I believe the good is something we have to work toward. And that the bad is maybe the default state. Maybe that's the fundamentalism, again. But it does make me want to work a little harder for the good.

Is that patriotism? It's probably the closest I'll get. It's not the kind that will blow up fireworks. 

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