How to Be a Patriot
“No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.” –Barbara Ehrenreich
When Robert Kennedy was assassinated on June fifth and died on June sixth, I was eleven and we were living in London for the year on my father’s sabbatical from Rutgers. It was my mother’s birthday and she put her arms around myself and my two older sisters and said we would never go back to America. My parents had loved John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. who had been assassinated that April. The Vietnam War was raging, and the United States looked like a place you would willingly leave. But my father turned to my weeping mother and said, “Of course we’re going back. We have to go back. We’re Americans.”
I was surprised by this. I thought of my parents as rebels, they protested the war, they supported all liberal causes, they were vocal and active in their beliefs. But they were also staunchly patriotic. Years later when I made some crack about emigrating to Canada, my mother reminded me of the country’s treatment of their own indigenous population using the term “racist” to describe what seemed to me as a bastion of good behavior and values. Her point was that the United States is flawed, has a terrible history of slavery, imperialism, and warmongering but it also had a constitution and allowed citizens to articulate their concerns through voting and protest.
I spent my junior year of college in Dublin, Ireland where I encountered other American students who chose to remain loyal to the USA by seeking hamburgers and other Americans, spending most of their time comparing Irish beer to that produced in the United States. They complained about the smallness of the refrigerators and the lack of decent pizza. The other group went native, picking up bad Irish accents, wearing Aran sweaters and often omitting their country of origin. I did neither. All my friends were Irish or English, my accent came and went, I saw the time as a unique opportunity for deep immersion in a country where my maternal grandmother was born and raised, and all my other ancestors were buried. But I always identified myself as an American and while I welcomed criticism of our politics and values, I proudly identified myself as from New Jersey, a state the Irish viewed as a mob paradise, which it was, and hideously ugly, which it wasn’t. I was called a ‘repulsive Yank mouthpiece’ in a humor magazine’s review of a play I was in with an entirely English and Irish cast. I was told it was a compliment.
“Patriotism is something you deeply felt. You didn’t have to wear it on your lapel or show it in your window or on a bumper sticker. That kind of patriotism does not appeal to me at all.” –Sam Shepard
In 2013 I went to Abu Dhabi to teach English in an Emirates School which could have been the setting for any number of Monty Python-like sketches. The response to any request, an attendance sheet, a classroom, a paycheck was the same, ‘inshallah’, which according to the Oxford English dictionary means ‘if Allah wills it’. When the office manager Mubarak responded to a request for one’s passport to be returned with this phrase it was hard not to feel he could simply open his drawer and return it. As a feminist and human rights advocate, I found the UAE a challenging place to live. Immigrant workers were treated horribly, women were constantly scrutinized for compliance with the dress code, and the church and the state were the same. I had never realized how much that meant to me until I perceived any criticism of the government was a challenge to god. I escaped without informing my employers I was leaving, the same employers who constantly issued arbitrary commands affecting our work hours, choices in places to live, and other immutable democratic rights. Before I became an enemy of the state, I flew back to America.
Arriving at O’Hare in the middle of a polar vortex, I found myself suffused with gratitude. Gratitude for my right to protest, to criticize political figures and laws without fearing retribution. Gratitude for being able to greet and thank men who helped me in gas stations and being free to chat with my Lyft driver without causing him to get in trouble. I was grateful for labor unions, for laws protecting individuals from harassment, for any number of things that represented democracy. Yes, there was much to object to still, but I realized there was a reason my aging parents joined with other dissenters, intellectuals and rebels to read aloud the constitution every Fourth of July.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach