A FRIEND’S REPORT FROM a local Pride festival last weekend noted that someone was selling crocheted penises. This was happening about the same time that my husband and I found ourselves at a summer festival in rural Ohio where the most prominent display under the T-shirt tent was a shirt bearing the phrase “This is how Americans take a knee” and a silhouette of a soldier kneeling to take aim with his rifle.
So much cultural flexing these days. So much obsession with owning the other side. Is this the best we can do?
Cultural rifts are on my mind a lot as our nation careens toward its 250th birthday. I’ve noticed that lots of folks are either asking themselves whether they still love their country or whether, in light of The Horrors, it’s defensible to do so.
Now, generally speaking, if someone is doubting their love of the good ol’ U.S. of A. these days, it’s a good bet they identify as Democrat. Similarly, if someone has plastered their car with the Stars and Stripes and an America — Love It or Leave It bumper sticker, you’re probably looking at a Republican.
Both of these positions seem like extremes to me, and a little too much like Pride penises versus gun T-shirts. But today I’ll leave the critique of performative needling and concentrate instead on love of country. Or my love of it, anyway. Because I do love it. The country. The flag. Our checkered past. The whole messy enchilada.
I KNOW I LOVE THIS PLACE in part because watching its cultural and political descent over the decades (I was born in the 60s) has been so very, very painful. The problems did not start with the way the current administration has normalized government grift and authoritarianism. No, years and years of cultural coarsening and the dumbing of America conspired to give Trump this moment in history. Devolution is excruciating to watch. Great swaths of American society are growing ever more intellectually vacant and spiritually ill even as the smartest of us get closer and closer to curing cancer, and even as funding platforms burst with donations from individuals helping neighbors and strangers who are facing hardship and loss.
You’ll never go wrong betting on paradox here in the U.S.A.
So yes, we are sick and a little dumber than we should be, and yet we don’t stop loving a family member who is sick or who makes a few poor life choices, do we?
An infection of greed and lust for power runs rampant at the moment in our government, and I really hate that. But I sure do love the land itself. The acres of flat Ohio farmland and the Colorado mountains and the seashore and the exhilaration of New York and Chicago and L.A.
I don’t eat funnel cakes, but it makes me happy to know that at county fairs and small town festivals across the land this summer, funnel cakes are being fried and eaten just as they were in 1976. I’ve been to Vegas once and that was enough for me, but the United States wouldn’t be as cool without the place and its excesses. And I’ve never been a farm girl, but I’m glad for cattle ranches and cornfields.
On any given day, if we are out in the world, we’re more likely to encounter kindness than cruelty. Gotta love that. There’s no guarantee, of course, and it was ever thus. And it must be said that the odds of encountering cruelty certainly have increased since 2016, especially for anyone who looks like they might be a member of a minority group.
But caring, generous, polite, righteous, normal individuals also abound, much as they always have.
I loathe the Electoral College, and gerrymandering, and the incessant gaming of politics that has always plagued the nation and continues today at fever pitch.
But boy, do I love democracy.
Every time The People speak through their votes, there’s proof that the system more or less works. “More or less” because ideally, it would be nice if all voters were at least minimally informed, and they’re not, but oh well.
I used to be fonder of capitalism than I am today, given that the wealth inequality in the U.S. is light years past acceptability, and expanding at warp speed; we’ll never catch it, will we? No one needs to be a trillionaire, Elon.
But I love the founding dreams of this nation — the promise of individual opportunity along with the notion of equality that the Founders had the guts to put down on paper, even if fully embracing it eluded them at the time. As it continues to elude us. It matters that these dreams themselves still matter, even if the work of keeping them alive looks a tiny bit hopeless sometimes.
And yeah, I love the damn flag. The house we live in right now is lovely in so many ways, but I haven’t figured out how to get a flag-pole bracket to fit securely on its rounded porch pillars. If I did, we’d hang a flag on the flag holidays, and I’d be fierce about it, because my fellow liberal-leaners have too easily ceded the flag to the aforementioned performative conservatives, and it pisses me off.
These United States, such as they are — well, they’re our home. The country belongs to all of us, and as such we are called to critique it and work together to fix what we can. But critique and disavowal are two different things. And disavowal seems to be in the air.
I can’t tell anyone else how to feel about that, of course, but to me, being embarrassed to embrace one’s home should itself be embarrassing, like dissing your partner at a dinner party.
On this 250th birthday of our nation, I can’t tell anyone else what to think. But if I could, I would ask those who’ve lost their faith in freedom and their love of country to abandon all doubt and recommit.
We have to love the United States if ever we are going to continue to reach for the American ideal. And what other choice do we have but to continue reaching?
Everything in this post was made by me, not by AI. The illustration was done with pencil, gouache, acrylic markers, and Photoshop.
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