I’m Not Patriotic
This 4th of July, I Celebrated Anyway
See that girl in the photo above? The girl who thinks she’s blending but looks painfully uncomfortable?
That’s me, pretending to be festive. I wasn’t always this uncomfortable.
In my earliest years we celebrated the 4th of July with families from my mom’s church. Latin music from a boombox, hot dogs on the grill, kids crowding near the fence to watch the neighbors’ fireworks while the dogs hid under the table.
When my dad started earning more, we decorated the sky above our patch of Floridian woods with fireworks that could’ve held their own above skyscrapers. Poppers, watermelon, champagne, barbecue and sparklers. Too much of everything.
We wore American flag T-shirts from Old Navy. I painted my nails in bold hues of red and blue. I idolized Lizzie McGuire, so I made sure to decorate my hair plenty, too.
All of this was theoretically meant to celebrate the country we lived in, but I don’t think I made the connection. It was just another excuse for a party.
Most of the schools I went to as a young child did not include patriotism in our curriculum. On the occasions I attended a school that did, it was startling.
I remember a boy my age, no more than 7, teetering down the aisle of our morning assembly, struggling with an unwieldy flag four times his height. In a sudden, irreversible moment, he tripped on his shoelaces and jolted forward, pooling the corner of the flag lightly onto the linoleum floor before he righted himself again. A collective gasp issued from the chairs.
“What’s happening?” I whispered to the girl next to me.
“If the flag touches the ground, even once, you have to burn it,” she whispered back, eyes round and knowing.
“Burn it? Why?”
She shrugged.
The failed flag carrier’s face was flamed red, lips trembling.
The next day, the school administration quietly burned the flag in the parking lot. We stole peeks over the second-story windowsills of our classroom. Students would tell and re-tell this incident the rest of the year. The boy was never put back on flag duty, memorialized forever as “the kid who dropped the American flag”.
It was around this age that my dad started showing me propaganda from other countries.
My wide eyes reflected the images flashing across his clunky IBM monitor: Soviet Russian anthems, German troops marching in perfect formations, Chairman Mao’s portraits looming over crowds.
“All of these things — the songs, the marching, the pictures — the country uses them to control its citizens. It’s called propaganda.” My dad was patient and non-emotional in his explanations, but the images and sounds scared me.
Of course, you can imagine the problem this would cause when I entered public school and my entire 5th grade class stood and faced the flag in the corner. I took in their synchronized movement, the mouths moving in unison. I pledge allegiance to the flag…
The flag? Why were we pledging allegiance to a flag? What did that mean? Weren’t we too young to be pledging allegiance to anything? If we pledged something, didn’t that mean we had to keep our word? Horror curdled my stomach.
“This is propaganda!” I blurted out.
The boy next to me cut his eyes over and hissed, “You’re not supposed to talk during the Pledge!”
I couldn’t believe what I had seen. I rushed home to tell my dad.
“Propaganda, right in the classroom! The other kids didn’t even know what they were saying! I thought propaganda was only in Russia and places like that!”
My dad smiled softly. “Propaganda can be anywhere.”
“Well they say we have to do it, but I don’t want to do it! I don’t want to pledge allegiance to a flag, that’s weird.”
“If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to.”
“Really?”
“Really. It’s your choice.”
The next day, I exercised my right of choice and sat through the pledge, glaring with superiority at the drones around me. This greatly upset the regime, who threatened corrective action if I sat through the pledge again.
I reported this bit of information to my dad, who in a once-in-a-lifetime display of parent-school involvement called the front office and had a chat.
The next day they announced over the intercom that while you did not have to say the pledge, you at least had to stand out of respect. My teacher shot a deadly look my way when the pledge began. I stood and shot my deadliest look back for the entirety of the pledge, mouth pressed into an airtight seal.
My refusal to participate in these basic gestures of patriotism have angered people on the left and right of politics over the years.
This year, a liberal friend tried to physically force my hand over my heart during the national anthem.
“What are you doing?” I whisper-yelled.
“What are you doing, it’s the National Anthem!” she retorted as we grappled awkwardly.
It’s not that I dislike our country. Or that I don’t think there are many reasons to be grateful for living here.
My dad, a first-generation Welsh immigrant, would list the reasons out to me on our Sunday drives to the library.
“In America, you can be anything you want to be. You can decide you want to be one thing, and then change your mind five times. I think that’s marvelous.”
“In America, sometimes people have stupid opinions. But you can have those! You’re entitled to as many stupid opinions as you’d like. I think that’s a great thing.”
“In America, people love to go over the top. They celebrate everything. Sometimes, that’s nice.”
But outside the library doors, when a clipboard petition would present itself under his nose, he would beam and say, “Sorry, not a citizen!” then lean down and whisper with a wink, “And that’s why I’ll never become one — no petitions!”.
I have my own list of reasons for why I enjoy living in America. But I’ve never been able to subscribe to the whole love (or hate) for country thing, because, well — what is a country?
Is it the governmental institutions that run the country? The laws we follow? Is it the people who live here? Is it our history? Or is it Bruce Springsteen and apple pie and hot dogs?
Because I was mortified when President Trump signed the travel ban, but proud when the judicial system blocked it.
I am grateful for the words “all men are created equal”, but angry when “unalienable” rights are alienated, when those truths are self-evident for some Americans and not-so-self-evident for others. I understand why Colin Kaepernick kneels.
I am glad about the handing over of the Panama Canal to Panama, but ashamed of the internment of Japanese-Americans.
I love “Born in the USA” and a good homemade pie, but am horrified by the way we make hot dogs.
And the people who live here? When I look around, I just see human beings, who have an astounding capacity for both good and evil. I see humor and grief and aggression and love. People who are neither better nor worse than those in any other country.
Do we need to believe we are better than the people on the other side of invisible lines? Would we be happier and kinder if we understood that we are just human, too? Would our country be healthier if we celebrated the good and admitted the bad?
My mom moved up north when I was fourteen. Left to his own devices, my dad observed July 4th with Chinese takeout and Das Boot.
It had been awhile since I’d observed the day, but this year I had a reason. My husband and I had made friends with a Brazilian couple here to do research who had never celebrated the 4th before.
I thought of times I had visited other countries, how I wanted to experience their traditions, even and especially the nationalist ones. We had to do it up big for them.
I wore red, white, and blue for the first time since 2004, and invited a small group of friends to gather. I bought hamburgers and brats, and a giant watermelon. The hosts decorated the cake like an American flag and played horrendously patriotic music. I was embarrassed the entire time, until the card games ended and we filed outside.
In the drizzly street we shot off rockets from the empty beer bottles in our hands, and set off showers of sparks in every color. I glanced at the people around me, whose families had come from Egypt and Puerto Rico and Brazil and Lebanon and the UK. Our necks were all craned up at the sky, jumping when the cheap fireworks went off with a bang, smiles illuminated in red and green and gold. Seeing my friend prancing in slow-motion around the yard with a sparkler in her hand to “I’m Proud to Be an American”, I yelled “Sarah, noooo!”, and laughed when she yelled back “You can’t stop me!”.
I might not be proud to be an American, but I was happy to be human right where I was, in a wet yard in Florida, surrounded by these people, enjoying too much of everything.
