Thoughts of an American Patriot, Year 250

Our country’s 250^th birthday has got me musing about patriotism in this uncertain time. It’s brought to mind two events of my youth that express what patriotism used to mean to me.

One. I’m a fifth-grader in the Coos Bay All-City Choir. Six hundred kids are packed into the bleachers above the Marshfield High basketball court, and we’re singing “America the Beautiful” in our rough sweet young voices, and suddenly I am enveloped in a rush of liquid light that permeates my body and stays there, vibrating. My feet in their patent-leather Mary Janes seem to levitate from the rough bleacher boards, and for an instant I’m suspended in this uncanny medium, weightless and lighted from within, and all I can think is “This. This. Yes! This.”

Two. I’m fifteen, and our impromptu family band is joining the y’all-come Fourth of July Monmouth-Independence town parade. We perch on wobbly folding chairs on a flatbed truck driven by my cousin Alan: me on flute, my mother on trombone, my uncle on tuba, my grandfather on accordion, and my cousins on clarinet, sax, and fiddle. I forget what we’re playing—I want it to be Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell” (you probably know it; it’s the march made famous and absurd by Monty Python’s Flying Circus), because we are hilariously terrible. But people cheer us on anyway, and afterward we go back to Auntie Pat’s for hot dogs, watermelon, and homemade ice cream.

The joy and gratitude I felt at these moments are tied up with the joy and gratitude I felt at being an American. I knew in my heart that I was stupendously lucky to be born in a country where kids get to go to decent schools with good music teachers who teach them to sing together in husky harmony. A country where friendly and generous neighbors cheer valiant efforts just as warmly as they do victories. A country where everybody gets to be in the parade.

America turns 250 tomorrow. Flags are flying everywhere and fireworks tents have popped up like mushrooms in the parking lots of big-box stores. Bandstands are festooned with red-white-and-blue crepe paper, and players are warming up to play “American Patrol” and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Parades assemble in middle-school parking lots: the marching bands, the church floats, the shiny fire trucks, the rodeo princesses on their prancing horses, the Shriners in their little cars.

I used to love all this. I want to love it now, but I’m not in a celebratory mood. I ask myself, what exactly are we celebrating? How is it seemly to celebrate the birthday of our democratic republic at a time when our elected leaders are gleefully unraveling its very fabric? The rule of law, power distributed and checked and balanced, a secular civil authority, protection of civil liberties, due process for the accused, respect for the right of all of us to live, love, and worship according to our own conscience—all those foundations, crumbling.

Our founders were no babes in the woods. They knew as well as you and I that history is full of tyrants who robbed the treasury, fleeced the citizenry, invaded other countries for spurious cause, and suppressed dissent with cold brutality. So they crafted a system with brakes and constraints intended to curb the ever-present temptation to corruption and self-dealing. They didn’t expect their leaders to be angels, and neither do we. But so far we’ve elected them in the hope that they'll adhere, or at least pretend to adhere, to some basic rock-bottom level of integrity and service. That expectation now seems laughably naïve.

So what’s a patriot to do? Shall we mark this 250^th Independence Day not as a celebration but as an elegy, the last hurrah of a noble, doomed experiment? Shall we raise a toast to a dying star? Shall we shrug and say, oh well, it’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long?

No. There must be another way. I want there to be another way. I want to believe that my precious America can be resurrected. I don’t know how to do it; I feel helpless. But out of my helplessness let me offer a blessing:

May the goofy good cheer of the Independence Days of my youth be restored to all of us. May the neighborly spirit of parades and barbecues and fireworks solidify into an intention. May that intention spread through our political body like a rush of liquid light. May it lift us gently off our feet, fill us with courage, and inspire us with the conviction that America can do better than this. That we all deserve better. 

I still get choked up when I hear “America the Beautiful,” especially the line, “God shed His grace on thee.” I’ve always read it as a confident assertion, almost a brag: God did shed His grace on us, because we are so special. Now I think of it as a humble petition. Please, God, shed Your grace on us, because we need it now more than ever.