On Patriotism, Our Constitution, and the American Dream: Our Message as Mosaic

Sarah Beattie
Jul 30, 2017 · 10 min read

On Saturday, January 21st, joining hands with sisters and brothers at the Women’s March through D.C., I recall my sense of dread that the power of the march would be lost and prostrated in fragmentation. Signs around me and voices carried through the air called for everything from women’s reproductive freedom to environmental defense to impeaching our newly elected president. I feared we could be discounted in our inability to unify around one common message. In the days and weeks after the march, it was clear I was not the only person who saw that fragmentation and criticized the Women’s March because of it.

Women’s March on Washington, D.C., January 21st, 2017

Those criticisms still permeate the Women’s March narrative, but they shouldn’t. Had the organizers of the Women’s March asked for unity in a single specific message, we would never have achieved the numbers we did, not just in D.C. but across the country and the world. Rather, we achieved an overwhelming solidarity in the threads that wove our voices together. Recognizing our shared humanity while celebrating our differences, calling for the fair and equal treatment of our fellow citizens under the law or calling out the hypocrisy of laws that fail to acknowledge the humanity of all citizens, empowering voices that felt silenced, defending our freedoms, and committing to improving our communities became the mortar for the mosaic of the Women’s March message that gave rise to and unified the powerful demonstration.

Acknowledging this congruity changed my perspective from the first step I took on the morning of Friday, July 14th, marching what would be over 18 miles from the National Rifle Association’s headquarters in Fairfax, VA to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. The messages across poster boards overhead and on t-shirts, hats, and pins throughout the winding river of bodies were as fragmented as those at the Women’s March. This time, though, I could understand that fragmentation for what it was; not as discord, but as perfectly carved puzzle pieces that fit together with seamless elegance as part of a bigger picture. I had only to take the time to assemble the pieces in order to understand.

Everyone had their individual reasons to march and, whether I could relate to the specific message or not, I saw beyond the specifics to find our common threads. We brought our own contexts, and, in the hours padding along all of those miles, we had the opportunity to listen and to be heard, and to better understand the spectrum of context to see the individual humans inhabiting each.

Some marchers, black women and men, had legal permits to carry a gun. These men and women have stories of unequal treatment and injustice at the hands of law enforcement and society at large to which I will never be able to relate, but personally relating to a story must never be the bar for believing and taking action because of it. Though as a white woman I have no place to speak for my fellow marchers, I aim to amplify their voices and their message. These men and women, with so many behind and beside them, marched to fight for all to benefit from our inalienable rights as american citizens regardless of color, not just in theory but in practice.

Just over a year before that morning when we marched, law enforcement failed to recognize and respect Philando Castile’s right to carry a firearm. In the weeks to follow, the NRA, an institution that claims to fight for and defend the Second Amendment, failed to speak on his behalf as they have done for countless white gun owners before. Mr. Castile had a permit to carry. When he was pulled over, and subsequently alerted the police officer that he had a gun in the car, the police officer shot and killed Mr. Castile.

These black men and women saw another black man shot for legally carrying a gun, a tragedy which, were it a white man who had been shot, would have (and historically has) elicited outrage from the NRA. And yet here, when the victim was a black man, the NRA was silent. In the wake of Philando Castile’s murder, these men and women marched to speak out against the NRA’s racist hypocrisy.

Some NRA members began to echo this after hearing protesters and marchers’ speaking out about the NRA’s inconsistent response to injustice because of the victim’s skin. It is in these moments that we are most certain that it is never a fool’s errand to speak up on behalf of the silenced in an effort to find those unexpectedly open ears.

Whether or not you agree with the NRA’s interpretation of the Second Amendment that all American citizens should have a right to own a gun or carry one in public, do you agree with the patriotic act of defending the rights of a fellow american in the face of injustice? Do you support any initiative to give humanity back to the unjustly silenced or disenfranchised by serving as amplification for their voice?

The NRA claims their cause is rooted in the protection of our Second Amendment. This concise amendment says nothing of qualifications for this freedom, specifically race. The men and women of color who marched to call out the NRA’s hypocrisy are rooted in the movement by their commitment to the fair and equal treatment of all americans under the law. The NRA claims to support that very point. So, we have somehow managed to take a single stance repeated by both sides of a single debate, and come out on the other side incapable of understanding what the other side is trying to say. If what these marchers stand for and what the NRA also claims to defend is true, are we not all in fact fighting for the same thing?

The marchers merely intended to hold the NRA accountable to their purported commitment to the constitution. Then the NRA doubled down on their hypocrisy in failing to add their support to Philando Castile’s cause once their error had been pointed out to them despite his case being the poster child of their cause in all ways but the color of the victim’s skin.

NRA’s “Ring of Freedom” page (https://www.nraringoffreedom.com/), purporting to defend the freedom of all Americans.

So, the marchers aimed to pull the wool away from the eyes of those who have been fooled into believing the NRA strives to defend all Americans’ freedom and our right to bear arms. You either defend the rights of all Americans or you do not. The NRA does not get to pick and choose which Americans deserve these rights, to decide who among us deserve the protection of our constitution and those who do not, and simultaneously be allowed to call themselves patriotic.

Days before the march, the NRA released vitriolic videos framing the marches and liberal activism across the country as violent and self-serving. The first minute-long video has been interpreted as urging NRA members to take action against these demonstrations and to put an end to them. In the video entitled, “The Violence of Lies,” Dana Loesch says, “The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with a clenched fist of truth.

If the NRA claims to stand in defense of our constitutional rights, they are inevitably aware of the First Amendment, which grants all citizens the right to free assembly. Either the NRA chooses to defend the constitution or it does not. The NRA does not also get to pick and choose which amendments it deems worthy of defense and simultaneously tout their superior patriotism.

With all of that said, as the NRA has now done with which Americans to defend, and which amendments to deem worthy of protecting, the NRA picked one message to perpetuate from the many at the march from the NRA Headquarters to the DOJ, which was that once again the Second Amendment was under attack, and all other messages or actions at the march were somehow proof of the marchers’ hypocrisy.

More light should be shed on that particular message rather than accepting the soundbites as sufficient, because messages around needing better gun regulations and to roll back the militarization of our citizens were certainly present that day. Many marchers were relatives of victims of gun violence who, driven by the pain of their personal experiences, were motivated to march in support of stricter gun regulations and gun safety.

Whether or not you feel that our country needs to increase regulations to address the pervasive gun violence taking over ninety American lives a day, by acknowledging these marchers’ humanity and their shared human experience of loss, can you understand how these people came to their conclusions through their pain and suffering of losing someone they love? This is not a matter of asking you to agree with a need for more regulation of gun sales or ownership. This is an ask for your efforts to understand solely the context of these views instead of denying them outright as baseless.

But perhaps it was to be expected. The NRA framed this march as a liberal, baseless protest, and an attack on the constitution, which could only have been possible to simplify to such an uninformed degree by averting their eyes to the clear catalysts. First, an American citizen was shot by law enforcement for carrying a legally permitted gun. Somehow, in the midst of the very scenario for which they claim to exist, to defend Americans’ right to keep and carry a firearm, the NRA was silent, choosing instead to only defend some Americans, not all. Second, the NRA released fervid calls to their members and followers to infringe on our American right to free assembly, choosing to defend part of the constitution, but, again, not all.

Where the NRA fell short in failing to defend an American’s rights, we marched to be the voice that the NRA should have been and claim to be for all Americans. We marched to stand up for Philando Castile’s right to be treated fairly and equally by law enforcement, and to recognize that, if interpreting the Second Amendment as granting all American citizens the right to carry a firearm, then so too should Mr. Castile have had that right without fear of retribution. We marched to highlight the NRA’s hypocrisy in failing to defend an American gun owner because of the color of his skin. And we marched in response to the NRA’s divisive and un-American call-to-action.

If we can dismantle the hypocritical vise on our political system that is the NRA, we can begin to loosen their hold on our politicians, and only then may we be able to have the semblance of a level-headed conversation around gun policy undeterred by any elected official’s fear of losing hard-earned funding.

Regardless, no matter your stance on the NRA, on bias in our police force, on guns, or even on the efficacy of marching as protest, we owe it to our country to recognize, beneath the layers of rhetoric and taglines, that we are all asking for the same thing: for our rights as American citizens to be respected and defended without asterisk or caveat.

Crossing the Key Bridge into Georgetown with the sun setting on a long day of marching, I carried a sign that read:

American PATRIOTS fight for and protect the RIGHTS and FREEDOMS of fellow Americans and our American ideals with SELFLESS BRAVERY no matter our color, composition, or creed.

We hear this kind of language from conservatives speaking in defense of our freedoms and in support of patriotism, but it can just as easily be employed by liberals. Going a step further, when we realize we are all saying the same thing, we can also realize that it is high-time we stop using our differences to drive wedges between us and start recognizing amidst these differences that we have so many similarities that bind us together.

To those who would stand up in defense of American ideals and our freedoms, and yet speak out against our right to march in defense of a fellow American, to those people I ask, can you show me a marcher who does not also believe in the necessity of defending our American ideals and our freedoms? Though we may demonstrate this differently, are we not fundamentally supporting the same thing?

Lastly, some marchers showed up the morning of July 14th at the NRA headquarters to march those eighteen miles less in support of any one message, but rather in search of something more fundamental: a community. We all want a sense of belonging in a society where, depending on the context, we are made to feel “other.” This “othering” causes us to stop listening and only shout louder in an effort to be heard. If we all took a moment to listen, not just to the rhetoric and taglines of either side, but to the contexts and the human experiences driving these narratives, we would realize we are so much more alike than we are in opposition to one another.

In Sebastien Junger’s book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” he wrote: “The most alarming rhetoric comes out of the dispute between liberals and conservatives, and it’s a dangerous waste of time because they’re both right. […] If you want to make a society work, then you don’t keep underscoring the places where you’re different — you underscore your shared humanity, …

It’s about time we all take a good look at the American Dream to figure out why it has come to feel like a zero sum game. The American Dream tells us as individuals that we can be whatever we want to be, but there is one path the American Dream is making more and more evasive: to be celebrated for our differences while unified in our citizenship of one of the greatest countries in the world.

If we all start spending more time listening and, rather than immediately preparing to counter, looking for the context and the threads of shared human experience that bind us together, we can all take ownership of and pride in making this country a cohesive rather than a divisive power.

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