What Patriotism Could Mean If We Let It

I’m late to the party, but….happy birthday, America. Also: yuck.

Both of those feel right right now, and I’m tired of pretending only one of them is allowed.

Every Fourth of July, we host friends at our cabin in northwest Connecticut. College friends and their kids, now the significant others of their kids (shout out to Sam!). This year it was so so hot, the kind of hot where you stop trying to do much of anything. So we sat in the pond. We ate too much. We ran fans. We complained about the deer flies, which show up every year like they, too, have a tradition to keep.

There is never much of a 4th of July theme. No red, white, and blue napkins, no flag, no fireworks. No cake decorated with blueberries and strawberries to look like a flag. It didn’t even occur to me to do any of that until I sat down to write this. That absence is the reason for this essay, I think.

A few weeks before all of this, my daughter was packing for a trip to Europe with her friends (two weeks, unsupervised, eighteen years old—I can’t even imagine getting to do that when I was her age). She considered bringing an American soccer jersey to wear to World Cup watch parties. I told her not to.

It just felt obvious, why mark yourself as American if you didn’t need to? But I’m not sure that advice was my greatest parenting moment. It was me signaling to my kid there is some problem of where she’s from, of who she is. And I wonder if that was just allowing other people to define what America is, people I don’t think deserve to do that.

And certainly there are plenty of reasons to be ashamed of being an American right now. We are detaining people in concentration camps because of immigration status. Our court system is being attacked in ways that look like the breakdown of rule of law. Corruption is so rampant it isn’t even hidden anymore. The people running our most powerful industries have made it clear that the common good is not a consideration in their biz plan. And the story many of us were raised on—that this is a place where hard work get you somewhere, no matter who you are—isn’t one I can tell my daughter with a straight face.

So I’m not going to sit here and tell you to be proud to be an American.

But I want to talk about the word “patriotism,” because how we define it is important. The patriotism that drives me insane is the type that is actually love of power pretending to be love of country. It’s manifest destiny. It’s the idea that success is all the matters even if it comes at a cost to someone else. It’s forgetting the things we’ve done wrong because remembering is inconvenient to the story we like to tell ourselves of our “greatness.”

But we don’t prevent repeating the same mistakes by looking away from them. We prevent them by witnessing them, looking again and again, on purpose, at them until they shape how we see the world.

I think that’s the version of patriotism I might actually be able to get behind. Not pride in what America was, but seeing clearly what’s happening right now. Refusing to look away from it. Being sad about it and even mad. And then using those emotions to imagine a version of this country that I want for my daughter.

I pushed my daughter, pretty hard, to consider college outside the U.S.. Europe, Canada, anywhere that wasn’t here. If I’m honest, some of that was me giving up on her behalf. She wasn’t really interested. She still feels like an American. Of course she does, she is one. And I think encouraging her to leave was modeling exactly the thing I’m worried about: deciding the country isn’t worth the fight and stepping out of the ring.

If people like me, those of us who are dissatisfied, embarrassed, enraged right now with what is going on in American, opt out of the idea of America entirely, we just hand it, fully, to the version of it we can’t stand. There’s no neutral position here. There’s only who’s doing the imagining.

I wrote last month about eschatology, how your vision of where things are ultimately headed helps shape how to act now. This is the same idea. If I can’t picture a version of America I’d actually want to build toward, I have no compass for what to do this week, this month, etc., or how to talk to my kid about the country she’s choosing to stay in. Patriotism, if it’s going to mean anything to me, isn’t a feeling I either have or don’t. It’s a discipline. It’s deciding, on purpose, to keep imagining a country worth the effort, even when, maybe especially when, the feeling isn’t there.

Happy birthday, America. I mean that, and the yuck, at the same time. I think that might be the only honest way to say it this year.

A version of this tension (how we hold onto something imperfect without either lying about it or abandoning it) is a lot of what Beyond Wellness is about too, just at the scale of a person instead of a country. If you’ve read it, a review on Amazon helps more than almost anything else you could do for the book, even a couple of sentences, because it’s what tells the algorithm to put it in front of more people. You don’t need to have bought it there for the review to count, here’s a link to the instructions. If you’ve been meaning to, today would be a great day!