You know what pisses me clean off? Performative patriotism. The car with the giant American flag and the “F**k Your Feelings” sticker. The singers and songs that claim to love “America” but are really just promoting American exceptionalism/supremacy. The companies that are kowtowing to a desperate Trump administration’s desire to conquer the world by committing to Gulf of America and Lake America, knowing full well that as soon as he’s gone from office they’ll change it back to the correct names because the president of the United States has literally zero authority to change the names of international bodies of water. The performative “Make DC Safe and Beautiful” initiative that is actually about feeding the ego of a failed president who is dead set on tearing down anything that doesn’t glorify him. I’m tired of looking at Trump’s face and name in so many places it doesn’t belong (the Department of Justice, Department of Labor, the Kennedy Center, the U.S. Institute of Peace, to name a few.) I’m tired of some people in the heartland of this country claiming to be more American than people who live in cities. What exactly constitutes a “real American” anyway? I’m tired of white supremacy, bigotry, xenophobia, and misogyny dressed up as patriotism. I’m over it and I’m done being even remotely polite.
I have, with no sarcasm at all, nothing but respect for those who do blue collar jobs, who work with their hands, who do literally back-breaking work. Those jobs are hard, they’re almost always thankless, and often overlooked. I have respect for law enforcement who actually care about citizens and want to keep people safe. I respect federal civil servants because most of them truly care about the work they do. They’re not in it for glory or big bucks. They do it for love of country and a deeply held belief in public service. I also happen to have deep respect for Black Americans because their ancestors built this country, for no money, without choice, and despite brutal conditions, and demonic slave masters. And, I have immense respect for all immigrants to this country. Most come, and came, here to escape difficult situations in their home countries and because the idea of being able to become whatever you can dream if you work hard enough isn’t a reality in many places (not that it actually is here since our governments, local, state, and federal, work pretty hard to keep poor people poor.)
I’m tired of modern-day Republicans having a stranglehold on so many states in our country. My home state of Alabama (and probably others) profits off of, and uses, the carceral system as modern day slavery, “leasing” inmates to businesses as employees and then garnishing their wages. That is both un-American and wildly American. And they do this while claiming to be more patriotic than blue states. I’m equally tired of Democrats, specifically coastal ones, who look down on the South, crow about their superiority to all of the Deep South, pretending their comments and beliefs aren’t willfully ignorant and elitist.
I’ve lived in Washington, DC for 24 years. I grew up in Mobile, Alabama. Mobile will always be as much home as DC is now. It’s where I spent my entire childhood, is a part of who I am as a person, and where we buried and scattered the ashes of my mother. DC is where I’ve chosen to live, where I met my husband, and where I raise my family. Living in DC is unique. We are the seat of our country’s government, pay federal taxes, our citizens join the U.S. military, yet we lack any voting representation in Congress. People do this willingly. What is more American than that? It’s the very definition of “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” But, the majority of Republicans will say that I, and the 700,000 Americans who live in the federal district of Washington, District of Columbia, aren’t “real Americans” because we live in a big city (the DC metro area has approximately 6.46 million people) on the East Coast and largely vote Democratic. Also, Black Americans make up about 41% to 43% of DC’s population.
Finally, I’m tired of the infighting among regular Americans. This asinine administration, the deviants running it, and the hangers-on (tech oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk) have convinced so many that we’re the problem instead of them. The president of the United States has openly monetized insider trading via Truth Social, created his own bank, and is attempting to ice out any press that doesn’t slavishly praise his every move. No one asked for this, the majority of Americans strongly disapprove of Trump, and when you actually go into the world and interact with people, you see acts of kindness, none of which are for cameras. They’re just regular people helping each other in big and small ways. We can be better than we are right now. The possibility of our country living up to its potential exists, but not while white supremacy is allowed to flourish. We can’t allow horrors to go unnoticed, like the mysterious increase in Black Americans who are supposedly committing suicide by hanging themselves from trees, in public. Those aren’t suicides, by the way. Those are lynchings. All of them.
My call to action is this. Go out in public. Try not to view human interaction as an inconvenience to be tolerated rather than a chance to exist in a society. We aren’t going to fix this by only ever interacting with like-minded people except to be aggressive and hateful with the buffer and anonymity of of a computer screen. I want to believe the majority of people aren’t the worst people you’ve ever met. I’m not so naïve as to think terrible people don’t exist or that we’re not in a era of maximum entitlement. We absolutely are. Everyone wants a village when things get tough, but no one wants to be a villager if it means they have to give when they don’t feel like it. But, we can choose to be less awful to one another. It won’t happen overnight. It will require thoughtfulness, an ability to look at the whole picture instead of just the portion that you’ve decided benefits you the most, and commitment to voting. If you don’t understand a topic find a friend/parent/teacher/trusted person to talk to about it. Or go to Google and only click on links that end in .edu, or look at Reuters, the Associated Press, and the BBC. They all provide news without bias. Vote for political leaders who still understand their job is to help our country move forward, not stagnate, or regress. Vote out politicians, Republicans and Democrats, who no longer care about the entire country or its people. Vote for people who listen to the citizenry rather than whoever will donate the most money to their campaign. It will require giving a damn about people who might not agree with you. I know that’s almost unheard of these days, but that’s the hard truth. I mean, even Newt Gingrich, one of the most partisan, hateful politicians in living memory, managed to work with Democrats in Congress to help create Washington, DC’s public charter school system instead of forcing through a school vouchers bill. For things in the U.S. to get any better, we have to care about the betterment of all of us. So go, be kind, and vote! That is what real patriotism looks like.
*Above photo by Chris Robert on Unsplash.com.
