posted by eftychia at 05:34am on 2019-07-04
"Lives of nations are determined not by the count of years, but by the lifetime of the human spirit. The life of a man is three-score years and ten: a little more, a little less. The life of a nation is the fullness of the measure of its will to live.
“There are men who doubt this. There are men who believe that democracy, as a form of Government and a frame of life, is limited or measured by a kind of mystical and artificial fate -- that, for some unexplained reason, tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future -- and that freedom is an ebbing tide. But we Americans know that this is not true."
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (b. 1882-01-30, d. 1945-04-12; President of the United States 1933-03-04 to 1945-04-12), Third Inaugural Address, 1941-01-20
I love this nation, this country, land of my birth, whose ideals have been taught to me and at me my entire life, this nation founded on bold principles and has stood up so often for what is-or-could-be good and great in the world. I love this country, and because I love it, I very much want to be proud of it -- for all its historical faults, for all the ways the other key things it was founded on, its original sins of genocide and slavery, and all the ways the habits, attitudes, and policies of those have carried forward into my own lifetime -- for all its faults past and present, I still want to be proud of it, to boast of its strengths, its many accomplishments, its ideals. But as much as I love this country, my precious United States, this year I cannot be proud of it. Too many sins -- and sins too huge -- are being committed in our name by our government. The institutions and norms that have kept it robust despite missteps and crimes my country has committed or allowed, and have slowly, slowly steered us closer to the right path over time, are being undermined or simply circumvented and ignored. And we are inflicting vile and inhumane punishments on people whose only "crime" has been to attempt to follow the legal steps to request asylum here in "the land of the free" from horrors in their homelands (many of which horrors our own policies have created or worsened), because policy makers in the executive branch want to make their suffering so bad that they will forget all the promises we've made to the world based on what we want to claim as our ideals, and simply ... suffer and die where they came from. Meanwhile, a corrupt administration is being protected, no matter how transparent its own misbehavior, by legislators in the President's party who value holding onto power for the sake of power more than they value upholding all of our values or even those values their party claims as its own.
There are people in my country, people who like me are as much a part of this country as a kidney or a lung -- or a leukocyte -- is part of a living human, who are trying to resist and undo these sins, people who are putting their bodies on the line trying to oppose evil done in our name. I am proud of them. At the same time, we have Americans preaching a type of anti-Americanism even as they wrap themselves in the flag, who are trying to make things even worse. So: there are Americans I am proud of, and history that is a dissonant jumble of the great things and the evils America has done, and this glorious land, and ideals and principles we claimed, that point to the nation I love being worthy of taking pride in even as we try to make it better ... but this year, under the weight of my country's current sins that history has taught us the consequences of, not just the evil of, alas I cannot be proud of my country -- my country.
On this holiday, normally a day of cheer and closing an eye to our foundational sins and reveling in what we share as Americans, well, enjoy your picnics and your cookouts and your fireworks if you're going to, but this year what I'm feeling is shame for what's being done in our name, and fear of what comes next as the institutions meant to keep us on the right path are being undermined. I am sorry. I want to be proud of my country, my home, my homeland, but right now it's doing too much that I can not be proud of. We are inflicting inhumane conditions on those begging us for safety, we are allowing children to die in our custody, we are pulling support out from under the most vulnerable of our own people ...
I so want to feel the familiar pride on our most license-to-feel-proud day, but this year horror overtakes pride. I am ashamed of what we are doing and afraid of what we may become. I still love this land, but love is not enough to blind me to the shame. I dearly hope that one day I can feel mostly pride in this country of ours again. But I can't today.
There are those among us who "believe [...] tyranny and slavery have become the surging wave of the future -- and that freedom is an ebbing tide," and are actively working to make it so. I do not know that that is not our future, but I still hope it is not our future. I want that pride back.