Time to be Honest

We were traveling on Memorial Day, and came home to discover that someone in our neighborhood had put a small flag on our mailbox, as part of a general community salute to those who have died in the service of our country.  

Amen!

That little flag has caused lots of things to percolate in my mind.  

Once, during the Vietnam War years, my anger at our own government was so deep for insisting that we make that country's determination to escape (mostly) French colonialism an issue for us, and that all the war accomplished was a national shame, resulting in our ignominious withdrawal and absurd declaration of victory, that I refused to fly our country's flag, or to say the Pledge of Allegiance:  I stood, but I could not say it, not because I was not committed to America, but because I was.  We had to be better than that!

And thinking of the Pledge, I have been uneasy about it ever since, during the Eisenhower years, at the height of the Cold War, the words, "under God", were added to it:  "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."  As a child in school, those words were not there.  They do not come easily to me.  They offend the promise of the Constitution that religion is entirely optional for citizenry; that we are not a theocracy, but a constitutional democracy.  We are flirting with a religious test for citizenship.

Try telling that to your neighbors these days!  They will quite likely be deeply offended.  We have almost come to calling ourselves not only a religious nation, but a specifically Christian nation of the light-skinned sort.

By evelinagustafsson@live.se -
Own work, Public Domain

In contrast, our Norwegian friends and relatives cover their part of the earth with flags and banners and traditional dress, not only on Syttende Mai--their Constitution Day--but whenever the urge to be festive happens upon them.

I used to hold Syttende Mai parties, and the sheer delight of their nation feeling good about themselves drove me to put my own flag up again.  I do not know who put the flag on our mailbox, but I appreciate it.

I suppose that once family and clan were the largest social bonds we had.  We still have them; some strong, some loosened for other groups.  After all, some families are pretty miserable, and some are cohesive.  We have just driven to the Upper Midwest to visit family and friends, and not a mile passed without impressing us with what a strong bond people form with the land; their land, their place, their identity.  Never a Kansan, never to become a Kansan, I am stunned each time with the beauty of the rolling grasslands of Kansas.  Similarly, each time, everywhere, there is powerful evidence that people bond with their places on earth.  On the fjords and mountains of Norway.  In Palo Duro Canyon.  Minnesota.  The green, green fields of Iowa.  Everywhere.

By accident and intention, the people who migrated to this part of the Americas formed a political and social organization from one ocean to the other, from what Canadians were doing, similarly, north of us, to Mexico south of us.  It is a big, rich and beautiful land.  It does not have the pressures that squeezed Norway up against the Atlantic, from Denmark in the south, to Sweden in the east.  Norway defines itself over against those neighbors.  We defined ourselves against Europe.

Our seams are looser than some nations.  It took cajolery and a Civil War to convince the colonies along the east coast to become a nation.  We are still wrestling the Civil War, not just over former slavery, which issue has morphed into White Supremacy, not open slavery, but over the size and nature of the kind of society we think we want to be.  Texans like to think they bargained for the right to exit the United States:  they didn't.  They retained the right to break up into multiple states, not a separate nation.  Our sometimes intense regionalism--the Old South, New England, Westerners, and so on--is evidence of our unease with the whole nation, and the bargains we have to make to make it work.

Some people want a religious haven:  white Christians are the most aggressive about that.  They want at least a Christian primacy and advantage.  Some people want a Caucasian dominance, or perhaps just a larger, western version of wherever they came from in Europe.  All that ignorant championing of English language only is just a way to argue for something like England.  The English language is doing just fine in enlarging its territory without privileged rules.  It is painful to hear people with bad grammar and syntax trying to argue that everyone speak English.

It is easiest to stand together as a nation when the nation is under threat from outside:  military war, economic war, etc.  Then we put up the flag again!  It should not take a war, but war does sharpen the senses, as the threat of imminent death usually does.

It might be that, at present, very large economic changes--the decline of industrialism, the surge of electronics, automation,  new power and possibility and changes--and our lack of a clear analysis of what the changes are, means our government is thrashing, as we are doing individually, as well.  It is difficult to be patriotically enthusiastic when you don't really know what to do.  Look at how people and politicians are still arguing for coal power, still talking about what used to be the industrial midwest.  Remember when Catholics married only Catholics, and Black People knew their place, and nobody knew an Asian?

That isn't America today.  That will never be America, and it never was.  To be genuinely patriotic is to believe in what we are, not what we think used to be, or cannot be.

It is time to be honest.  With ourselves.