Patriotism

Who Is the Patriot?

Rev. Dr. Fredric J. Muir

Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis

May 30, 2004

The statistics cited by Louis Menand in a recent New Yorker book review, lead to the conclusion that “Americans are the most patriotic people in the world.”[1] This certainly rings true for what I grew up with in my hometown. Though Oak Park, Illinois was just a street away from the Chicago city limit, it might as well have been “downstate,” that is, in small town Republican farming country. The 1950’s and 60’s racist, segregated, living-on-alert-because-of-the-Cold War Oak Park that I knew was as conservative, hardworking, hard-nosed and yes, as patriotic as our “downstate” country cousins. And when the annual Memorial Day parade came the Saturday morning of the holiday weekend, our version of Main Street was lined five and six rows deep—and you had better show up early to get a good spot! Unless, of course, you were in the parade, which I was for many years. Due to my Scouting activities, my troop had the honor of marching, as precision-like as middle schoolers could, right behind the high school marching band. It was a thrill, something we looked forward to doing for most of the year. To see our families waving to us, to be seen by our friends who were standing on the sidelines, and if we were one of lucky ones, to be carrying a flag—that made it all the more special. We were told it was an honor; we were representing our family, community and country; only in America, we were told, could boys our age be this involved and motivated—it was a patriotic privilege.

Here is what Menand wrote: “… between ninety-six and ninety-eight per cent of all Americans said that they were ‘very’ proud or ‘quite’ proud of their country. When young Americans were asked whether they wanted to do something for their country, eighty-one per cent answered yes. Ninety-two per cent of Americans reported that they believe in God.”

I applaud and agree with James Baldwin: “I love America more than any country in this world …” And I recognize that others love their country too. I think love of one’s country, which would be a part of many people’s idea of patriotism, is a natural thing. When Karen and I visited close friends in Sweden, their patriotism was verbalized daily: their cars, their welfare system, their cheese and coffee and mountains and snow—Sweden this and Sweden that. They love their country and were proud to tell us why. I’ve had similar conversations with others – all of them good patriots.

“I love America more than any other country in this world,” wrote Baldwin, “and, exactly for this reason,” he concluded, “I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”[2] As it happened to Baldwin, as Barbara Kingsolver told us in her words from Small Wonder (in her essay, “And Our Flag Was Still There”), sometime after my Scouting days and Memorial Day parades and before my first year of college, I became suspicious of the flag-waving, draping, flag-wrapping patriots of Main Street. Perhaps it’s when I saw pictures of Hitler Youth carrying flags and marching—youth my age; or Soviet Young Pioneers doing the same. Or maybe it was when a friend of the family gave me two books to read, “Read them right away” he told me. One was entitled, “Better Dead Than Red;” the other was, “In Came Christ the Tiger.” When I showed them to my minister, he shook his head and told me he’d be happy to throw them away if I wanted. And then we talked about hope and a vision for a world made fair for all, and how life is so precious. Ever since, while I still get goose bumps from rousing patriotic songs and I enjoy a good Sousa march, while I love to watch our nation’s flag blow in the breeze, while I too love my country and serve it as best as I know how, I see the wisdom in H.L Mencken’s observation that “In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.”

What was being sold back in my youth was a version of patriotism that ended at U.S. borders, and sometimes it didn’t get beyond the village limits. McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Civil Rights and Black Power, Vietnam and Watergate were just a few of the big headline stories that rocked my home town and brought out the nativistic, nationalistic, flag bearing patriots who it seemed were threatened by just about anything that made them look beyond their American way of life, a way that they felt must have been ordained by God and clearly sustained by the state.

I can now see that what was helping to fuel this skewed understanding of patriotism was fear of an alternative and growing definition of patriotism, another way to look at patriotic allegiance. What for some were reasons to close the borders, carry a big stick, and demand loyalty oaths were for others opportunities to broaden, deepen and stimulate cross-cultural exchanges and international harmony. It was this sort of vision that led Presbyterian minister, novelist and essayist Frederick Buechner to write:

“All ‘-isms’ run out in the end, and good riddance to most of them. Patriotism for example.

“If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we’ve had enough of them.

“If patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to make us avoid them like the plague.

“If patriots are people who believe things like “Better Dead Than Red,” they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, and then be taken off to the funny farm.

“The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who love their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of Democracy, Communism, or anything like that but champions of the Human Race. It is not the Homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost but the planet Earth as Home. If in the interests of making sure we don’t blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty.”[3]

I’m happy to say that my hometown has changed quite dramatically from the place I knew as a youth. As far as I can tell, the narrow ideas of patriotism that Buechner refers to would be rejected and his vision of a patriotic loyalty to Earth as Home would find general acceptance. When I went away to college, I could feel that there was a country-wide discussion going on about what it meant to be a patriot—from family dinner tables to university campuses, from faith communities to Washington, DC, from war torn front lines to the United Nations, a re-examination of patriotism had commenced. It was from these discussions that there emerged a world snapshot unlike anything we were prepared to see. And today, it’s a picture of a much more interdependent world than we’ve been led to believe: “If we could shrink the earth’s population to a village of 100 people, with existing ratios remaining the same, the world would look like this:

“There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both north and south, and 8 Africans.

“52 of the 100 would be female. 70 would be non-white. 70 would not be Christian.

“6 of the 100 would own 59% of all the wealth in the world and all six of these would be from the United States.

“80 of the 100 would live in substandard housing. 70 would be unable to read and write. 50 would suffer from malnutrition.

“Only 1 would own a computer. Only 1 would have a college education.”[4]

Looking at the world in this way, I find it difficult to go on with my life operating under old assumptions of patriotism, a patriotism heavily invested in nationalistic assumptions, oaths and jingles. This snapshot of the world community could be a forceful and unpleasant reminder that we live in a human community of mutual dependence and responsibility. It could also challenge and urge us to remove invalid and exclusive barriers that get in the way and prevent the honest recognition that there is only one race, the human race and everything else has been constructed by those who would seek to divide and conquer the world or their own people. It was toward this divisiveness that one party leader noted:

"Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."[5]

The challenges and realities of the intimacy and size of our world and the role of strong, visionary leadership came quickly at around 9:15 on September 11, 2001. Along with Where were you the day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Where were you the day President Kennedy was shot, Where were you the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered, will forever be Where were you on the morning of September 11? It will be a moment to mark the rest of our days, won’t it?

In the days that followed, there was national grief, then international grief. The outpouring of authentic concern, love, and loyalty from around the world was nearly unbelievable. Unlike at any time in my memory, there was patriotism of the human race that was unparalleled. Do you remember President Jacques Chirac of France proclaiming what the world felt: “We are all Americans now,” he told everyone. And it was a year later that President Bush told the world: “America will take the side of brave men and women who advocate human rights and democratic values. The United States will promote moderation, tolerance, and the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity—the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, and respect for women, private property, free speech, and equal justice.”[6] The window of opportunity was there; the kind of patriotism to the planet called Earth and all her people was finally here. Perhaps out of such carnage and grief would rise the compassionate politics we’d been promised; here was an opportunity to define a new patriotism, the kind of patriotism not made of native and narrow nationalism, but of universal internationalism; here were the makings of a patriot’s vision that was true to our national creed of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for all the children of the earth.

But even then, it was already too late. The patriot’s dream of the future was to remain the politician’s rut of the past. And it grew worse. Lacking the kind of patriotic imagination, vision, and honesty that the times demanded, our country has been led deeper and deeper into the quick sands of confusion, disloyalty, and deception. In short, we have ventured down a path that is unpatriotic—to our people and to the world.

First, at a time that demands international cooperation, our nation has adopted a foreign policy based on the doctrine of you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us and consequently we have found ourselves more and more isolated and without friends. But even before the full implementation of this doctrine, our leadership was isolating us from a world community that once looked to us for direction and support. Here are just five blemishes from a lengthy list of ways that our current leadership has failed us and the world community:

· The US will not endorse the International Criminal Court that prosecutes genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. 68 nations have endorsed it.

· At a UN conference on global warning, in a vote of 178 to 1, the US was the only nation against proceeding with the Kyoto Protocol.

· At conventions on the rights of children and the rights of women, the US has also been the single holdout.

· The US won’t sign on to a world-wide ban of land mines.

· The US attempted but failed to block a UN anti-torture plan that both the European Union and Latin American countries endorsed.[7]

I don’t know about you, but I am embarrassed and angered when I hear about our leadership’s opposition to resolutions that are overwhelmingly supported by those patriotic to the world community, opportunities where we should be leading instead of resisting and complaining.

Second, this turning away from the community of world cooperation and opinion and going our own way has helped to create and shape a mood, environment and attitude that allows some civilians, politicians and military personnel to think and act as though human rights, civil rights, decency and tolerance can be overlooked and disregarded under times of crisis or distress. I know something is very wrong when our national leadership announces to the world that it will decide when the Geneva Convention Code of Conduct (for POWs) is applicable and then approves of torture; when we have leadership that urges suspending the Constitution’s guarantees of due process and rights to privacy and calls it an act of patriotism. I know something is wrong when our President claims that Christians, Jews and Muslims all worship the same God, but then holds court with bigots and racists like the Rev. Franklin Graham (who said that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion”), and the Rev. Jerry Vines (who called the prophet Mohammed a “demon-possessed pedophile”) and the Revs. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (who agreed that 9/11 was a punishment on the U.S. for its liberal proclivities). When the stakes are so high, when patriotism is being redefined, why is our President associating with these people? What I’m saying is that the attitudes, policies, statements and associations that our leadership endorses and conveys has helped to create a space where a local politician thinks it’s alright to send out to his colleagues in the Maryland Legislature his nephew’s school paper about how Islam is a religion of war and not peace; it sends a message to our governor that its alright to call multiculturism “bunk” and “crap;” and it helps to create a climate where torture becomes an acceptable method of interrogation.

And where has this kind of go-it-alone-because-we-know-best nationalism taken us? To the most unpatriotic act of all—deception and lying. We and the world were told over and over that there were at least three reasons for a preemptive strike on Iraq:

· Their stockpile of weapons of mass destruction

· Because of the country’s link to terrorism, that is, Al-Quaida

· Most of the world community supported us and supported regime change

Lies, all lies. Why aren’t people outraged? Now the war is justified by saying that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein. Of course the world is better off, but that’s not what we were told. Do you think the American people and Congress would have backed a war in order to remove a leader simply because most of the world didn’t like him? Talk about rewriting foreign policy: Is it now our foreign policy to rid the world of leaders we feel make life unsafe? If so, it is a policy based on madness.

Our leadership has failed us. If it continues the course, the chasms that divide our communities—locally and internationally—will grow even wider when they are already gaping. I know that there is only one thing that will begin to heal our nation and the world, a large and genuine act of patriotism to us and the world community. As I did on Sunday, September 20, 1998, when I said that President Bill Clinton needed to resign, this morning I urge that our President take bold, immediate and patriotic action:

· I urge President Bush to ask for the resignations of Donald Rumsfield, John Ashcroft and Condolessa Rice.

· I urge President Bush to ask for the resignation of Vice-President Cheney and fill that position by appointing Senator John McCain.

· I urge President Bush to announce that he will not seek a second term.

My hope is that one of the results of such actions will be that after the initial shock of what has happened, a nation-wide debate on the issues will follow; it will also send a clear message to the world community that our nation is intent on doing the right thing—as patriots to the world.

In January, my colleague Forrest Church wrote in the UU World:

“In 1816, Stephan Decatur proposed the ultimate toast to nationalism: ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ American patriotism refutes this sentiment by emending it. Speaking against the extension of ‘Manifest Destiny’ into the Philippines in 1899, Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri said: ‘Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.’ What we need today are a few more patriots.”[8]

Things are terribly wrong here at home and throughout the world. We need bold, strong, visionary leadership that is committed to a world community. It’s time to put things right. It’s time for patriots stand up.