On Patriotism
My grandfather lost his ring in New York City and found it in Kunming, a city in southwest China. He enlisted in the Army after Pearl Harbor and ended up training as a radioman on planes. They shipped him out of a hotel in New York City somewhere, the name of which has been lost to time, and he left his class ring on the sink. He was halfway across the Atlantic when he realized that he has left it behind, I’ve always thought that was hard for him. He was born in Luverne, Minnesota and this was as far from home as he’d ever been.
He went from New York to Morocco, then Egypt and onto Iran. From there he was stationed in India as part of the plan to fly supplies over The Hump, flying back and forth between India and China over the Himalayas. This is how, a year or so later, he found himself sitting across a mess hall table from a stranger. As he ate he started looking at the guy across from him, and it didn’t take him long to realize something shocking — this guy was wearing his ring! My grandfather asks the guy “Hey, did you find that ring in New York City?” and the man across the table is baffled. He asks “How did you know that?” and my grandfather gets to respond “That’s my ring.” The stranger takes the ring off and passes it across the table.
I tell that story not because it’s my favorite story to tell, but because I think a lot about that young man, as far away from small town Minnesota as he could possibly be because he believed in America. I doubt he thought much about all of the injustices we associate with that time period now, he was a kid with a rural Minnesotan high school education, but he believed in what America stood for enough to be willing to fight and maybe die for it. He was a lifelong Republican, in a way that caused issues with his children around Vietnam, but before he died he voted for Obama because he thought it was time for that in America. He’s who my mind goes to when I think about the average American.
We’re facing an unprecedented moment in the American experiment, and it’s a moment where it would be easy to decide that America isn’t worth saving, that we need to burn it all down and start from scratch, free from the weight of history. That would be squandering both the idea of America and all the positives that have come from that idea. Yes, America is a country founded on slavery, but it is also a country that was willing to fight a war with its self to try to free the slaves and, maybe, be something better. That’s the contradiction that fuels the country, a flawed place struggling to improve, and it’s what we can all aspire to in the days ahead. That’s what inspires my patriotism.
I don’t want to peel back the curtain too far, but there’s also a rhetorical heft to all of this that you would be foolish to abandon. Draping yourself in the flag is a cliche, but it works. I, as a writer, can make you feel things by aspiring to the things that you like about America, the country you live in, and if I can do that you can do that too. Patriotism is a cheat code to strengthen your ideas for an audience of Americans, or if you’re willing to, strengthen your movement. The reality is that most people like America, and if you’re saying that you hate America you’re both outing yourself to your audience as an outsider, and making your task of persuading others of your position that much harder.
We can seize this moment to build a better patriotism, and hopefully, a better America through it. As I said before, America is a promise. My country, the one I was born in, promises freedom for everyone. Freedom for trans people to live their lives in the way they want to, freedom for whoever wants to come here and try to make it better, freedom to become the best person that you can be. It’s a country that produces people who love the idea of America so much that they go out under its name and try to do good elsewhere by fighting disease and feeding the hungry. That’s a place to be proud of, that’s a place worth believing in, that’s a place you can feel patriotic about. I’m willing to struggle and fight for that because it is clear that the people in power don’t believe in that America. Will you join me?
