“When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse…”  – Hannah Arendt.

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise, he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” – Theodore Roosevelt.

“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will not be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and in the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is beyond destroyed…”  – Hannah Arendt.

 

I’m not sure Roosevelt or Arendt would recognize the America they might see on the news today. I’m not sure I do.

I never used to think about patriotism at all; I think about it often now.

I was taught my whole life that lying was wrong, a moral failing, a sin. Every time I lied, I damaged myself and regretted it; lying brought me nothing but fear and shame.

When I finally swore to myself that I would never lie again, I felt a thousand pounds lighter and happier. Lying is difficult; it corrodes the soul, I will never consciously do it again.

But here we are, living in a hurricane of lies, a nightmare racing across the sky and into our lives.

I won’t succumb to it, accept it, or let it damage my life. I have absolute faith that the truth will prevail; it always does in the end; it always will.

No dictator, evil army, or despot has managed to kill off the truth. It is willful and ferocious.

Lying is not patriotism, enabling lying is not patriotic, humanity calls us to tell the truth.

Hannah Arendt’s last great work – The Life Of The Mind – explored the question of whether human thinking could help us resist evil. She decided that the answer was yes: thinking was a shield against evil. There is an all too real defense against lies and cruelty; she found: human judgment.

We must like the person we see in the mirror each morning and listen to him or her, not the other voices that tell us what to be and feel.

I credit Donald Trump with inspiring me to think about patriotism and whether I was a patriot. During his presidential campaign, I had the sense of many millions of people riding around the country in big trucks and big boats waving flags in my face, almost contemptuous jeer.

People accuse me of hating Donald Trump as if this were all a Middle School playground fighting match full of name-calling. I do not hate Donald Trump, I don’t hate anyone.

Our differences are vast, but not personal.

I do hate what he and his supporters are doing to our country.

I hate it very much, and it hurts very much to see it. Can you really be a patriot and despise your country and mistrust and slander the people entrusted to run it?

The most patriotic people I knew for most of my life did not wave big flags around or drive big trucks up and down, honking horns loudly at fearful people.

They just quietly made sacrifices for things that are bigger than themselves – for all of us. For the idea of the country, for all of its troubles and failed promises.

Patriots are the people who risked their lives to get here and the people who died so that others all over the world wanted to get her and could come.

In 2020, I couldn’t find compassion and empathy in what I saw on the news and in the streets and hospital wards,  and I thought there were humorless and angry people riding around, stealing and co-opting a flag that waved over people like me too, and for my grandmother.

My politics are simple.

I can’t support people who hate our country, despite its many flaws. I’m with James Baldwin, who said, “I love American more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”

A distant cousin of mine was killed when his destroyer was sunk in World War II; before he died, he sent his sons a letter in which he said, “if I don’t return, please remember that I am proud to die for a country as grand and free as ours, we all know what the other side is like.”

Everyone in the family got to read it.

My family knew all too well what the other kinds of countries are like, as imperfect as we are.

We didn’t want anyone to hijack our flag and our patriotism, so  Maria and I bought a flag and raised it over the farm, right next to a  giant Lilac Bush planted around the time Abraham Lincoln was shot.

It flies there still and will stay there as long as we are here. I love to look at it and hear it flap in the wind. I feel quite American, even like a patriot.

I’ve always struggled to define patriotism for those of us who are not warriors or heroes.

In Bruce Springsteen’s songs, the real patriots are the people who uncomplainingly get up and go to work every day, paying their taxes, cherishing their freedom, working hard, caring for their families.

Oddly enough, it has been my time with the Amish that has helped me clarify and define it for me. The Amish are patriotic about their community because that the community comes before the individual, not the other way around.

They put the general good above their own wants and desires. That’s the idea: all for one common good.

They put their children ahead of themselves. They put the earth ahead of their profits. They put their faith above everything.

I see we have a long and hard fight ahead of us for our country and for what we want it to be. I’m thinking a lot about that and about how I will respond to more turbulent years.

I’m not going to tremble and swim in pity and gloom. I just won’t spend my life that way, what is left of it.

I think I’ll handle it the same way I’ve been doing it. I want to do good every day while I am alive and help other people who want to do good do.

I promise to tell the truth and never lie or knowingly hurt other people. It is so much better to do good.

For centuries now, from Jesus to Socrates to Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Mandela, the great minds of the world have preached the power of good and placed their faith in it.

I believe that lying is a pandemic, and it will burn itself out or be smothered by truth.

Galatians 6,9 says, “And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.”

I won’t give up on good. I won’t give up on good.

I won’t give up on the truth.

I won’t give up on mercy and compassion.

And I won’t give up on being free or giving comfort and safe passage to those who yearn to be free.

For all of human history, those values have prevailed and cling to our collective human consciousness.

I’m staying with them.

That’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to be a zealot for good, and reap the joy and accept the consequences.

I’ll stand, in my writing, in my life.

“Politically speaking, tribal nationalism (patriotism) always insists that its own people are surrounded by a world of enemies – one against all – and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind, long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.”

– Hannah Arendt.