Love of country

 

The owners in the National Football League have come up with a 'compromise' between the pressures from the President and other conservatives and the free-speech rights of their players. There will be no more demonstrations during the national anthem before games, but players who do not want to stand for the national anthem can remain in the clubhouse until the game actually begins.
The players who would have been kneeling during the national anthem in order to protest police brutality against young black men and women are not satisfied with this new rule. They have protested that they are as patriotic as the owners (or the President). They feel that their love of their country is being impugned and they are defending themselves.

But what is this "love of country"?

This is an apt time to raise that question. We talk a lot about patriotism on Memorial Day.

It is one of the national holidays where it is traditional for us to tell outrageous lies about who we are and how we live our lives. Having just passed that milestone, it is now time to look at the truth.

It seems as if protesting current police practices and protesting economic inequalities which leave black Americans disproportionately poor, in poor health and in prison is perceived as unpatriotic by conservatives. When they love their country, they love the country as it is replete with injustices, with unimaginable wealth for some and serious deprivations for others.

The protesters, on the other hand, are deeply troubled by prevailing injustices. They cannot love the country as it is. They do not love the actual country. They love the possibilities of change, of re-distributing opportunities, of opening possibilities to those who now have little to look forward to. They love the many Americans – well-known leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks and ordinary citizens whose names we do not know – who take our promise to ourselves of freedom and equality sufficiently seriously to resist injustices where they see them, doggedly refusing to be treated as less worthy of respect than the rich and famous such as the owners of football teams.

In the clash over protests before football games two different versions of patriotism confront each other. Love of country as acceptance of all our failings, of all the ways in which we fall so very short of the brave and shining pronouncements about American democracy, and love of country as love of our ideals and commitment to struggling to approximate them more closely than we are doing today.

The conservative patriot loves America as she is today including its pervasive racism, including the second-rate status of women, including its commitment to redistribute resources from the poor to the rich – as in the most recent tax reform law. The largely unpunished murders of black people by police contravene the "rule of law" which we are so proud of but honor more by violating than by practicing it. But conservatives accept that too.

The conservative patriotism of the owners in the National Football League is self-serving. America, as she is, has made them very rich.

The love of country of the players protesting injustice,  is the only patriotism that is morally defensible—protesting injustices particularly against young Black whose life is in constant danger and for whom it is very difficult to get a good education and profitable employment legally. By banishing that patriotism to the clubhouse, out of sight, the owners manifest that what they love is being rich not any of the ideals of their country.

The so-called compromise over political protest before football games is truly shameful.

How to Resist Violence

If anyone is in doubt whether it is ever defensible, current events offer only too much evidence that violence should be avoided at all costs. The devastation in Gaza, the brutality on all sides in the Syrian civil war, the continued fratricide among Muslim factions in Iraq coming after more than 10 years of a war to pacify that country, the murderous militias in Nigeria, in Libya and elsewhere should make any reasonable person conclude that violence should be avoided at all costs.

This sentiment is only reinforced by the memories of World War I, whose beginning 100 years ago we commemorate today, or by the so-called Gulf of Tonkin incident, 50 years ago, where then president Lyndon Johnson made up a story of a naval attack on an American vessel. Lyndon Johnson used that lie to persuade Congress to escalate military action in Vietnam which ended only after to almost 60,000 American soldiers died there.

At this point, defenders of violence will ask whether we do not have the right to defend ourselves when attacked. What of armed men invading our house, or rapists and murderers attacking the innocent? It seems obvious to most people that we have the right to defend our lives and those of our loved ones. They claim that this readiness to maim and kill other human beings is part of human nature. That is who we are. There is nothing to argue about.

In 1914 the German armies invaded Belgium and France while telling their own people that Germany had been attacked. World War I was supposedly a war of national self-defense. 50 years later Lyndon Johnson persuaded Congress that we needed to defend our security in Vietnam. Today American hawks urge the current president to begin harsher military actions against Sunni insurgents because, they say, ISIS is a danger to our security, here in the US.

More often than not, the right to self-defense is invoked by the aggressor. It is most often used to conceal naked violence. The overwhelming share of violence in the world is blatantly evil and not to be justified.

Violence needs to be resisted. How do we resist violence? I do not carry a loaded gun, I don't even own one. I have serious doubts about the wisdom of going around armed and ready to kill someone. Is that all I can or should do?

But violence, while most spectacularly destructive when it uses weapons, whether primitive or technologically sophisticated, is not limited to people shooting at each other. Human beings are violent to each other and do tremendous damage to each other without threatening each others' bodily integrity. We inflict serious harm on others without guns and rockets, or knives, or rocks.

Children are injured by parental neglect, by fathers or mothers who simply disappear, or may remain in person but pay no attention to their children. Parents unload on their children the pain inflicted on them during their childhood. Children grow up to injure each other. Bullying in schools is widespread. Even more common are cliques that exclude. Children by and large are not taught to be thoughtful of one another or to be kind.

Some people think that the violence children experience is a good preparation for adult life when they will experience oppression at work, bosses that are insulting, and employers that exploit them, authorities that disrespect them. The violence that is ubiquitous in childhood just continues. The adults who have a say in our work life, or authorities that provide assistance, or experts who give advice about everything from cars and houses to how to save our marriages, are as likely as not to patronize us, to belittle our intelligence or good will. Everywhere we encounter persons who perpetuate the violence done to them as children by now visiting it on others, adults and children.

These thoughts came to mind recently when I attended a demonstration to express dismay over the destruction wrought in Gaza by Israeli bombs and guns. I realized suddenly that many people not only disapprove of blatant acts of violence but they take sides: the Israelis, some say, are simply defending their homeland and thus can do anything that puts an end to attacks by Hamas. On the other side are the people who regard Israelis as the reincarnation of German fascism. Whatever Palestinians do is thought to be correct. All members Hamas are heroes. Each party in the conflict, while, on the one hand, deploring the suffering of civilians, on the other hand, are cheering on their side. By their wholehearted approval, they encourage the fighting, the blind sending off of rockets and mortar rounds, of bombs out of the sky and drones. By taking sides, by encouraging the fighters of one side or another, Americans participate in the violence and perpetuate it.

The men or women behind the guns are not the only violent ones. Violent are the persons who send them onto the battlefield. Violent are the persons who support them, cheer them on and tell them that their cause is just.

No cause that kills large numbers of innocent bystanders is a just cause.

Instead of inventing nonexistent rights, such as the right to defend oneself, we should look into our own hearts and scrutinize our feelings and recognize the violence, the anger, the deep-seated suspicion that motivates so much of our behavior. We must acknowledge that in taking sides, we are involved in the big fights in the world and thus are, implicit in the death and destruction they perpetuate.

There is a clear difference between deploring the violence and destruction in Gaza, for instance, and taking sides by blaming one party and seeing the other party as heroes. It is hypocritical to weep over the children killed in Gaza and then support the Israeli government. It is equally hypocritical to weep over the children killed in Gaza and present Hamas as heroes defending the underdog victims.

If you take sides, you take upon yourself the guilt for children dying in Gaza.