Positive
My view of America is an overall positive one. Why is that?
First of all, I live in America now. It would be pretty bad move for me to have made if I thought the place sucked.
For someone like me, where my family and I call home is a fine place to live on a day-to-day level. I have access to a wide variety of products and services, including solid medical care and excellent childcare facilities. We have good schools and healthy food available to us.
My area and my family’s ability to afford to live here is a big part of that equation. If we had less, we would not be able to afford our healthcare, our childcare, or our property taxes. We might have to live somewhere which has poorer quality schools or is less safe.
And I know that the color of my skin, and my wife’s skin, probably makes life easier for us (a thought that makes both of us physically ill).
Things like that pop up a lot when I think about America. It is a land of greatness and travesty. At its founding it held both that all men were created equal, and that some men could be enslaved. It is a land of contradictions.
The mistake is to run away from these failings, or whitewash them in the name of defending America’s greatness. The task is to learn from them, and to pursue greatness, healing the wounds as best we can. That is not something that can be left to someone else; it is incumbent on all of us here to strive towards this.
But what would this better America look like? Events of the past, and how they are viewed today, provide a guide.
At My Lai, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson Junior intervened against the massacre:
Thompson and his crew continued flying over the scene and they saw a group of civilians running toward an earthen bunker with American soldiers following them. So, according to multiple accounts, Thompson did something that went against his military training and against the traditional concept of friend and enemy in war. It also took unthinkable courage. He landed the chopper directly between the advancing Americans and the bunker. He told the Americans that if they fired on the Vietnamese civilians--or on him--his crew would fire on them. He ordered Colburn and the helicopter's crew chief Glenn Andreotta to cover him with their weapons. Then he motioned for the civilians inside the bunker to come out and he arranged for their evacuation with other helicopter pilots who were his friends. The C Company soldiers looked on but thankfully held their fire.
Thompson is nowadays considered a hero. He received the Soldier’s Medal in 1998, and his actions began to be taught by the Army as a model of good soldiering.
What is not remembered is that, at the time, he was shunned and insulted. He received death threats over the phone, and mutilated animals on his porch. A senior congressman made a public statement of “if anybody goes to jail in this My Lai stuff, it will be the helicopter pilot.”
What is remembered is the myth. The helicopter pilot is lauded as an example of American greatness, and what is forgotten is the response to the heroism of him and his crew.
The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
These words are now widely seen to apply to all and women. But four of the five drafters of the declaration owned slaves, and a section of their original draft denouncing the slave trade was stricken by Congress before it was signed.
Additionally, one of the main components of participation in a representative democracy, suffrage, was heavily restricted even among white males in the states. Some states required property ownership as a condition of voting until 1856. Black people were prevented from registering and practicing their right to vote through a variety of overt segregationist tactics up until the mid 1960s, and suppression of voting rights through racial gerrymandering and targeted voter roll purges continues.
So it is clear that many of the freedoms considered quintessentially American were not part of the country until late in the 20th century, and there are widespread measures against these freedoms even today. But even the defense of these suppression tactics is rarely done in a way that opposes the American *concept* of liberty. The “quiet bit” is rarely said out loud (although I admit that it sometime is).
----
So what does it mean that America maintains a myth of its own greatness, one that is frequently contradicted by its own history? It’s easy to dismiss this as mass delusion, and there is some truth to this. To me, this seems correlated with the division between nationalism and patriotism. Orwell, in Notes on Nationalism, wrote that nationalism is
[…]the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.
Like a someone incapable of introspection, a nationalist might argue that America is and always has been great, that where fact and history may show otherwise, then the truth is a lie. They stand before the mirror, dissolved into this idea of the nation, and cannot understand its wrinkles or pores, are blind to its scars, and attest against all evidence that it is without blemish—and that you’d better accept it, or face the consequences.
Whereas a patriot is not dissolved into the nation, and look upon it with love despite its scars or history. They will seek to help it realize its best self.
Now, my countrymen, if you have been taught doctrines conflicting with the great landmarks of the Declaration of Independence; if you have listened to suggestions which would take away from its grandeur, and mutilate the fair symmetry of its proportions; if you have been inclined to believe that all men are not created equal in those inalienable rights enumerated by our chart of liberty, let me entreat you to come back. Return to the fountain whose waters spring close by the blood of the Revolution. Think nothing of me - take no thought for the political fate of any man whomsoever - but come back to the truths that are in the Declaration of Independence. You may do anything with me you choose, if you will but heed these sacred principles. You may not only defeat me for the Senate, but you may take me and put me to death. While pretending no indifference to earthly honors, I do claim to be actuated in this contest by something higher than an anxiety for office. I charge you to drop every paltry and insignificant thought for any man's success. It is nothing; I am nothing; Judge Douglas is nothing. But do not destroy that immortal emblem of Humanity - the Declaration of American Independence.
He exhorted a return to that ideas held in that declaration, even though these were not the lived experience of the nation. That appeal to greatness, the appeal to pursue it in earnest, is one borne out of love.
So what do I believe about America?
I believe that the founders of this country based it on ideals that burn bright, that these ideals exceeded their ability to comprehend, and that America is at its best when it advances towards a fuller realization of those ideals.
And I believe that a country incorporated (albeit unintentionally) around the realization of human rights, rather than a particular ethnic group, is worth a damn, and worth defending.