By David K. Shipler
Americans
who want to love their country have to do it unconditionally, the way a parent
loves a wayward child. Not to overlook flaws but to believe that correcting
them is possible. Not to ignore the racial hatred, the murderous wars, and the
impoverished children, but to cultivate the opposites that coexist with the
injustices: the embrace of pluralism, the repugnance to violence, the passion
for opportunity. This requires clear eyes to see what is and clear vision to
see what can be.
America
needs a Carl Sandburg, who in the poem “Chicago” could honor struggle alongside
raw
virtue:
On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger
. . . Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
America
needs a Langston Hughes, who could embed
within a verse both grievance and desire:
America
never was America to me,
And
yet I swear this oath—
America
will be! . . .
We,
the people must redeem
The
land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The
mountains and the endless plain—
All,
all the stretch of these great green states—
And
make America again!
America needs a Martin Luther King,
Jr., who could lament and challenge and believe within a single
sentence: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi,
a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of
oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”
America does have Rep. Jamie
Raskin, the lead House Manager prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachment, who said
this in his closing
statement:
“In the history of humanity,
democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and transitory thing. . . . For most of history, the norm has been
dictators, autocrats, bullies, despots, tyrants, cowards who take over our
governments. For most of the history of the world, and that's why America is
such a miracle.”
How do we love a miracle betrayed?
How do we love a nation tarnished? This is now a task for all citizens from the
left to the right, from the depths of deprivation to the heights of wealth,
from sea to shining sea.
The acquittal of Trump does not
teach us how to love a broken country. Nor would conviction have done so, no
matter how warranted. Either path would have turned millions of Americans of
one persuasion away from millions of others. Justice could not be done in the
Senate chamber. Justice has to be done in the hearts of the people. Justice has
to arise naturally from whatever inner values have been sown in every citizen,
whatever affection we hold for the cacophony of democracy, whatever beauty we
can see in the messy differences among us.
Love of country is the energy of reform. The
Republican Party has made sure that Trump will continue to use his perfect
pitch for propaganda. He will fix his marksman’s eye on whites who are alienated
and outraged and frightened—and violent. He will not be vanquished from America
any more easily than Voldemort from the world of Harry Potter.
The remedy to Trump’s toxic spell is a disapproving, combative love for an America wounded but capable of recovery—in short, an unconditional love full of contradictions. It is a pragmatic, persistent idealism and realism. It is a love not for a leader, not for a party, not for one policy or another, but a love for that miracle of self-government that has been, as Raskin noted, such an aberration in the course of human history.
