How I Define Patriotism
Monument Valley, in the Navajo Nation (Arizona)
MY GREAT-GRANDPARENTS came to the US from Lithuania to build a better life. My grandfather came to the US from Ukraine, against all odds, to build a better life. My father came to the US from India to build a better life. My husband was brought to the US by his parents who were escaping a totalitarian state. They wanted a better life for their children.
My children and I are all beneficiaries of these choices together with this country’s freedoms. It’s an honor to express my gratitude for all that on this semiquincentennial of US independence.
Today is an opportunity to reaffirm my place in this country’s history — a story rife with greatness and injustice, promise and betrayal — and its future, which remains wide-open.
My grandparents
I express my love of country through my willingness to hold America in its contradictions.
To me, patriotism is a reciprocal relationship.
This version of patriotism is authentic to me in a way that mindless denial and flag-waving are not. It’s easy to love America while the marching bands stream by and the fireworks go off. But how about when you learn about the massacre at Wounded Knee or the brutality in Selma or your own state’s founding constitution, the only one to explicitly exclude Black people?
Or as you’re accosted, day after day, by the casual depravity in the Epstein files or political corruption so flagrant and galling, you feel a silent scream rise up from your gut? Who could love that?
Believe me, I understand the urge to turn away from the very idea of patriotism. Chanting USA! USA! seems more like cult worship or Stockholm Syndrome. But to reject my relationship with this country is to disregard the bravery and sacrifices of my own family and countless strangers, all of whom made my own life possible.
There are points in every long, committed relationship when one must reckon with reality in all its contradictions and complications. That is love in action.
My patriotism is not unlike my vow to honor my marriage in sickness and in health.
Today’s lurid performance of American “greatness” is a constant assault. I’m angry and tired, and often numb. But I’m not hopeless. I won’t let propaganda or algorithmic projections define my reality. And I won’t let a cruel, inept, crumbling administration usurp this day or sever my bond to this place I love, this magnificent, blood-stained land, this country my family chose over and over again.
