Wrangler Dani

This year, I’ve read quite a few pieces about being conflicted about the celebration of Independence Day, and the USA in general. “The 4th of July is complicated for me this year” was the preamble to photos of kids with strawberry-stained lips and star-spangled outfits in my newsfeed. It made me wonder what kind of America we have been living in before this moment – was it a country without racial inequities and illness? Was it one without war or protest or dissent? Did it always live up to its promises, did the American Dream always deliver?

I feel that we’ve conflated patriotism with perfection. It’s easier to break down than build, and of course criticism comes easily while creation takes work; that’s surely a piece of our national obsession with fact-checking each other. But I wonder also if it comes from a false idea of utopian possibility, if we’ve forgotten that We the People are often terrible to one other in traffic on our way to march for the forgotten and the marginalized. Perhaps performative morality is too obviously self-interested to be of any use. But who judges such things? Am I just another arrogant critic, insisting on perfection when it’s an impossible standard?

Perhaps we’ve forgotten that when we celebrate a wedding anniversary we aren’t doing so because we’ve finally found a perfect union to get jazzed about. Rather, we toast and celebrate for a couple who has yelled at each other and withheld sex and slammed doors and stomped around the shared domicile muttering angry threats at each other for at least two hours (cough five days cough). We don’t celebrate their love (our love) because it’s easy or perfect, because we’ve done such a marvelous job of having and holding with nary a grumble. We celebrate because we have tried and failed and tried again and that is the essence of gritty, tough, love. We rejoice in our paltry attempts because this is the heartbreaking splendor of humanity, our fearful but unquenchable desire to keep going, to try again, to offer our hearts up to be broken in the name of love, in service of hope.

I’ve been stressed lately, pulled in too many directions, with too many loud thoughts in my head and nowhere for them to spill out. It’s hard to know what to believe or how to think, much less what to say. I’ve been contemplating Eve and the seduction of the serpent, the promise of knowing, the delightful illusion of complete power: to be judge and jury and Always Right – no wonder she chomped down, wouldn’t we all?

Eve’s temptation is very near to my heart – oh how I want to know I’m right, how I want my voice to be valued. But then I wonder if we have prioritized too many persuasive first-person think-pieces and not enough empirical facts, if in pursuit of  beauty and story-arcs we have forgotten that not all narratives are true. Ah, here I am again, taking my own bite from the arrogant apple, writing my first-person account as though another voice can add anything to the fray, now twice already in one piece I have made a judgment for others and broken it for myself, isn’t that telling.

The troubles of the world are too large for me, even my country bumpkin naïveté is not too dense to see that. I watch plagues and injustices and my musings seem pubescent and irrelevant. I’m a simpleton really: I still believe old-fashioned faith can save us.

It seems silly and trite, I know. But maybe although the injustices and unfairness of the world are too big, small acts of mercy are the way forward, the map out of despair. As I’ve been mulling over our first mother, Eve, I’ve also been thinking of the root of the word “patriotism”. Patriotism is derived from the Greek word “pater” for father, which became “patris” or “native land”. This of course is where we get the idea of fatherland or motherland, and patriotism means “love of native land” or “love of country”. It occurs to me that we don’t love our parents because they were perfect, we don’t honor them because they did everything the way we would choose. We give deference because for all their shortcomings they are still the place we come from, and as such, we should seek to understand, to offer grace, to give honor.

It seems to me that our willingness to honor others; to love our country for all of her foibles, says more about us than it does about the object of our grace. I don’t love my country because she needs or deserves my wholehearted devotion.

I love America, because in loving my neighborhood I can truly love my neighbor.