What Patriotism Means to Me - Part 1: Sins of the Past
This post will focus on just a few of the negative aspects of America. Before reading, keep in mind that I don't hate America, even if I have some harsh words to say here. I love America and I want it to be better. But in order to do that we need to accept our faults so we can work to correct them. This is just the first part of me explaining what America means to me. Stay tuned for part two!
What is America? Is it merely a flag, a collection of songs and old documents? Is it a history of violence, oppression, murder, and theft? Is it the dream of pioneers, risking their lives for a new life? Is it the nightmare of slaves being stolen from their homeland across the ocean to be forced to build a new land they are unfamiliar with? Is it the tragic tale of its original inhabitants, whose land was unjustly stolen from them, and whose populations were decimated?
Perhaps it is the energy of the many Americans who dedicated their lives, and far too often sacrificed them, to the noble task of improving the lives of their fellow countrymen. Perhaps it is the lives of the thousands who died for the cause of freedom in the fields of Gettysburg and the shores of Normandy. Maybe it’s the stories of the immigrants fleeing persecution in the old world. Sailing across the ocean to be greeted by that magnificent statue in the harbor bearing the words “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”.
I have loved America for as long as I can remember. But my patriotic nature has been challenged heavily in the past few years. It seems there has been an upheaval in American society. More than ever, people are learning the true facts about American history. More people are waking up, or in other words, going woke. Is it right, or even possible to continue to be proud of my country while acknowledging the many terrible things it has done? Can my patriotism be used for good? I would argue that yes it is.
Patriotism is defined by Merriam-Webster as “love for or devotion to one's country”. I would say that my patriotism is not so much with the country itself, but with the values it is supposed to represent. So what values is America supposed to represent? I believe them to be the following three terms as listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Life – Every living creature in this beautiful country has value and deserves to live. Black and white, gay and straight, Christian, Jewish, Sikh, whatever distinction you could make, including animals.
Liberty – Every human deserves to be free to do as they please with what they have, so long as it does not cause harm to one another.
The Pursuit of Happiness – Every human should strive to find satisfaction with life on this planet. They should pursue happiness in whatever way they see fit, again so long as it doesn’t cause harm to others.
Life
So how does America live up to these values? Well, historically and presently, there’s a lot to be desired. Let’s start with life. Life historically hasn’t been treated with the respect it deserves. Shootings happen every day. They happen so frequently that people are being desensitized by them. At the same time, they aren’t that common. But the fear of shootings is pervasive in modern American society.
This society sees this and yet people still cling to guns for “protection”. Protection from what? From the people who buy guns. Guns are seen as the solution to problems. They’ll protect you from the big scary other people with guns. This is contrary to what we are supposed to be, a place where life is respected and valued above all. We cannot be a moral society if everyone is armed to the teeth and scared to the point of shooting the first trick-or-treater or girl scout that comes to their door. This society is afraid of everything, and it is armed and trigger-happy. Guns kill innocent Americans every day, and rampant gun culture has no place in a society that values life.
Beyond just guns. Death and violence are an integral part of our folklore and identity. This country was born from war, it was stolen from its original inhabitants by brute force and murder, and violence continues to be embedded in American culture. The cruelty unleashed towards its citizens of color is another example of how violent America can be.
Look at the violence that was unleashed by US troops on the peaceful camp of indigenous Cheyennes and Arapahos at Sand Creek, Colorado. A peaceful band of indigenious people were waving a US flag to show that they had no intentions of fighting white settlers and a local army unit murdered over 100 of them. Stealing their body parts and artifacts to display in Denver. Is this the home of the brave?
Or look at the Tulsa Race Massacre. The community of Greenwood, Tulsa in Oklahoma was known as Black Wall Street because it was a place where black Americans were thriving. But white people couldn’t have that and the community was attacked for 2 days, killing hundreds of people and destroying the community.
Violence against black people here is nothing new. In the Jim Crow years in the south, people would lynch black men and there bodies would be displayed for spectators that would bring their children to gawk at them. They would steal items from him or even body parts, and this is supposed to be a civilized society?
For decades in the south, speaking up or trying to do something about this would put you at risk for being murdered by terrorists like the Klan. Even nowadays, Black Americans are murdered unjustly by police and by racist thugs, and the government does nothing. Hundreds of indigenous women are murdered and go missing every year, and no one bats an eye. The past will continue to repeat itself until the present wakes up and becomes aware of the truth about American history.
People of every political persuasion think violence is the answer to their problems, just look at what happened at the Capitol Building on January 6th. They invaded the place with the intent to execute and kidnap members of Congress for doing their jobs and certifying a democratic election, and our violent society enabled them.
Violence doesn’t solve problems. In fact, it causes more issues. We need to have a national reckoning about how our society relates to ideas of violence towards each other. Everyone needs to calm down and breath while we still can. We need to do something, people are dying because of our inaction.
Liberty
On to Liberty. Liberty is a word that is so abused that it practically has no meaning. It has been used as a buzzword by every political party in recent memory. But what defines Liberty? Merriam-Webster defines it as “The state of being free” or “the power to do as one pleases”.
Being free is a very good thing. It means that you can do what you want to do, you can take a deep breath in and rest easy knowing that you can control your actions. That is something worth celebrating. But it’s also a right that has been denied to far, far, too many Americans from the beginning. Millions of Africans were brutally kidnapped or sold to European slave traders and brought to America.
There, they were forced against their will to endure backbreaking labor with no hope of any kind of compensation for it. They were whipped when they got out of line or stopped working. They were treated more like chattel than the human beings they were. Furthermore, they were not free. It is absolutely disgusting that such a miscarriage of liberty happened in the so-called “Land of the Free”.
That’s not even mentioning that the land they were working on was stolen from its original inhabitants, who were forced off their land further and further west until there was no more land to steal. The indigenous Americans were deprived of their liberty to live on their own land. Many of them were forced into slavery themselves, if they were lucky enough to survive the epidemics of the diseases that were brought over by the Europeans.
Liberty has been denied to Americans of color throughout the country’s history, ever since the beginning. It is one of this country’s greatest hypocrisies that the freedom that it is supposed to protect has only applied to a small group of people. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to stay like that. It took the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans of all races, but the institution of slavery was eventually abolished.
Unfortunately through loopholes and abuses of power, many people were still kept in bondage until deep into the 20th century, and with the current justice and prison system, arguably until today. Liberty is perhaps the most cherished American value, but this country continues to struggle to live up to it. It is hard to breathe free when the system is stacked against you.
We cannot ignore the fact that for centuries “Liberty” was denied to millions of Americans on account of their skin color. Millions were not free to do as they please. They couldn’t raise families. They couldn’t learn to read or write. They could not breathe free, because they weren’t free. They were enslaved. Until we acknowledge that, we cannot erase the remnants of it in our society.
The Pursuit of Happiness
Finally, we end with the pursuit of happiness. Every American has probably grown up learning something about the “American Dream”. What exactly is the American dream? The definition that I learned was that it was the idea that anyone, no matter who, could succeed and prosper in life, this most often seen to be in terms of wealth. Well how does this idea work in reality? Well many people were able to find success in America. Through hard work, the lucky few were able to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps”, but not everyone is so lucky.
One of the greatest modern tragedies in America is the plight of its poor. The poverty rate in the US as of 2023 is 11.1 percent. It has fallen over the years but that is stil around 36.8 million Americans. Many struggle to find shelter on a daily basis. We can take comfort in knowing that after our shitty jobs we at least have a place to sleep. But for thousands of Americans, that's not the case. It is totally up in the air if they’ll be able to pay rent or be able to afford food to support themselves or their families. Often times these people are stuck working dead end jobs that would pay their workers nothing if they could, and that’s if they're lucky enough to even get a job.
Many people when they see unhoused people on the streets will quip “Why don’t they just get a job?” Try getting a job without an address, or references, or a phone. It’s not exactly a no-brainer solution that you might think it is. The rampant hustle and bustle of our modern money hungry society has left these folks in the dust, and the best we can do is mock them or ignore them. That doesn’t sound like pursuing happiness, it sounds like evil.
That brings me to what I think is the root causes of most of America’s problems. Selfishness and greed. People are so caught up in their own lives that they neglect everyone else. People are so driven by their quest for money that the have-nots are cast aside and forgotten. (I want to say something I didn’t include when this was originally written. Many people have understandable reasons to not focus more energy on the plight of the poor. They have their own issues to worry about, issues that we might not have if society worked better for all of us instead of just for the rich. But that doesn’t justify leaving the poorest of us out to dry.) People are so scared of being scammed out of less than 10 dollars that they refuse to give the homeless anything. Not only that, but most Americans are ignorant to all of this. People don’t think twice about the way the world works, shrugging all of it off as “just the way it is”.
But it’s not. It’s not set in stone. Things can change, but they can’t if people don’t care. This apathy is destroying lives. It is poisonous. It is disgusting and cruel. It would seem more fitting for it to be called The United States of Gomorricah, given how little attention people pay to the suffering in this country. We may be the strongest militarily and economically, but we are incredibly sick spiritually. We CAN change, unpopular opinion but I belive we CAN be better. But we need to work a little harder to do this.
After reading all of that you will probably guess that I hate America and think there is no hope in redeeming it. This is not true. If you read the beginning you would see that I called myself a patriot. This is because I believe that America is more than what it is, America is what it could be. But in order to get there, we need to recognize America's faults. We cannot afford to continue to pretend that America is perfect or the best. We need to recognize problems in order to fix them. Calling out where we can improve is true patriotism.
I have seen many people compare America to Ancient Rome. This is a fair comparison, but I do have a criticism of it. America has something Rome never had. They both might have a might makes right society, but America, contrary to Rome, has value. Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Freedom of Religion. Freedom of Speech. Freedom from Want. Freedom from Fear. These are timeless things that make up not what America is, but what it could be.
This is what true patriots fight for. Not to keep America as it is. But to bring it closer to the more perfect union. To make it more inline with what Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence. The American people have the unique opportunity to truly make a city upon a hill out of this land. A place where people of all backgrounds can live together in peace. But in order to do that, each and every American citizen needs to set aside their differences, examine our past, correct our mistakes, and work towards a brighter future together. Their will be pain, it will not be easy. But neither was founding the country in the first place. Progress is painful sometimes. But it’s worth it.
I both hate and love America. I hate it for the gross hypocrisies and injustices it commits under the flag that I love that’s supposed to represent freedom. But I love it for the things that flag represents, and for what it can be. I hope this 4th of July, you can rededicate yourself to making of this country, a more perfect union, as I have.
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