Towards a more perfect union

When a Nation cries

His tears fall down like missiles from the skies

Justice looked into Independence's eyes

Can you make everything alright?

And can you keep your old Nation warm tonight?

~~ “Justice and Independence ‘85” by John Mellencamp

This morning, an article popped up in my feed. It was titled “Is Patriotism Possible in Trump’s America?”, written by Jesse Berney for Rolling Stone. I highly recommend reading it. I was so struck by it that I posted it on Twitter and Facebook, and judging by the likes and retweets (including from the author), it struck a chord in others, too.

The premise is that many of us are feeling demoralized at what is happening in our country right now. We feel we have someone holding the highest office in the land who is neither qualified or intelligent or stable enough to hold that office. It’s kind of hard to be patriotic when you feel like an Ugly American, you know?

But the article states exactly WHY it is important for us to love our country. We want to see it do well, but we also want to make sure that we continue to work towards equality and justice for all. We want to see people get a hand up when they need it, and we want to see people held accountable when they do harm to others or to our country, no matter their status.

I’ve never been the type who was “my country right or wrong.” We’ve done plenty of horrible shit in our time and there was nothing ‘right’ about it at all. Because we care, we work towards progress. We work for fairness and we work for justice. We are and always have been a work in progress...an effort towards a “more perfect union.”

I’m tired of being labeled as unpatriotic because of my criticisms of the current occupant of the White House. Or of the Bush administration, which misled the American people and got us into a stupid war. (All wars are stupid, although some are justified, but that is one of the stupidest.) I’m tired of being told that I need to “respect the office.” How about this? I’ll start respecting the office again when HE does. This guy is one of the worst things to happen to the office, to the presidency, and to the world. I will never stop saying that.

I am a patriot. I love my country for the good it has done and can do in the world. I love it for our great achievements, our innovation, and our innate sense of goodness. (I still believe that.) We are experiencing a pretty serious glitch right now, but I am confident that we will fix it. 

Happy birthday, America. If I criticize you, it is only because I want to keep fighting to make you better for everyone and to make you continue to show the world that we are a force for good, not for ill. I haven’t given up on us yet and I hope the rest of the world won’t, either.

This is my country, too

As we head into the July 4th holiday, I’m feeling a little feisty.

::sigh:: I know, I know. I just can’t help it.

I was just in a Facebook discussion that arose when a friend posted something about Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 essay about right wing conspiracy theories and paranoia. I’ve written about it before, and if you’ve never read it, I highly recommend it. It’s eerie in its application to what is happening in our country today.

I simply left a comment stating that I love that essay, and someone else commented that Hofstadter was a Communist and hated capitalism, and if I thought that was great, maybe I should move to Russia or China. They wrote that our government is “the people for the people.”

Yeah, it was on. I’ll post my reply here, with slight editing. I’m sick of some people saying that because I’m liberal, I don’t love my country, or I don’t support our troops, or I’m not a true American. First of all, I’d sure love to know what constitutes a true American. Apparently some think that it entails wanting to kick the ass of every country on the rest of the planet, just to show that we can. True leadership—and I still believe that America is a global leader—comes through diplomacy and friendship and a genuine desire to help others and make things better for all. Simply dropping a bomb on someone is not a sign of strength; it is a sign of weakness and bullying. Some seem to feel that a “real American” lives in rural areas, perhaps in the Midwest. I’m guessing that every New Yorker who witnessed the death and destruction on 9/11 would take exception to that definition.

Anyway, here is what I wrote.

Hofstadter's personal beliefs and ideologies have nothing to do with the validity of his essay about the far right and their paranoid behavior. It was valid when he wrote it; it's every bit as valid today.

It continues to amaze me to hear people say that their freedoms are being taken away by this liberal government. Where were you when Bush was tapping your phones? Where were you when he and his cronies advocated throwing people in jail without charging them for any crimes? Where were you when they gave the green light to TORTURE, ignoring the Geneva Convention in order to satisfy their hair-trigger, cowboy, jingoist, sadistic wet dreams?

Why weren't you up in arms when THOSE freedoms were being taken away? And I'd really like to know which, exactly, freedoms you feel are being taken away by this administration.
Just like every other American, I've been affected by taxes, health care, the military, student loans, and housing. I've seen the devastation wrought by an incompetent administration's tax cuts, unjustified wars, and an unwillingness to fix our broken health care system. I've had family members, senior citizens, have to declare bankruptcy because of catastrophic illness and huge medical bills. I've seen our national deficit go through the roof because of the previous administration's wars without the taxes to finance them. I watched as our economy came close to collapsing because of the GOP's lack of regulation on Wall Street, and I watched as the unfettered greed of bankers and mortgage companies took our country to the brink of economic destruction.

"The people for the people?" Are you prepared to pick up the tab for infrastructure maintenance and construction? Do you have a neighborhood group that has potluck dinners once a month so that you can plan how you'll fight the fires that strike one of your neighbors' homes, or YOUR home? Do you like your public library? When you retire, are you planning on opting out of Social Security and Medicare? Are you prepared to foot the bill for your parent's nursing home bills and medical bills? Do you have bake sales where you raise $500 to help pay for the kid next door with leukemia's hospital bills, which are approaching three hundred grand?

I am sick unto death of people talking about the evils of our government. It is OUR government, it helps us stay healthy, it helps with our education, and it helps us with our day-to-day lives.

If YOU hate our government so much, I suggest that you take a slow boat to any country that oppresses its people, restricts their speech, dictates their religion, and requires women to be punished for not being virgins on their wedding day or forces them to bear a child that resulted from rape. Just go enjoy that for a while, and then tell me about how much you hate our liberal government.

Fuck yeah.