Thursday, February 16,
2017
Loving
America and Resisting Trump: The New Patriotism
Protesters hold signs while demonstrating during a rally against
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., Nov. 15, 2016. (Photo:
Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
So reality has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life.
It didn’t take long. Yes, Donald Trump is actually the president of the United
States. In that guise, in just his first weeks in office, he’s already declared
war on language, on loving, on people who are different from him -- on the kind
of world, in short, that I want to live in. He’s promised to erect high walls,
keep some people in and others out and lock up those he despises, while threatening to torture and abuse with
impunity.
Still, a small personal miracle emerges from this nightmare. It
turns out that, despite growing up an anarchist protest kid who automatically
read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States alongside
the official textbooks, I love this country more each day. So I find
myself eternally upset about our new political reality-show, about a man so
thin-skinned he lashes out at everything and so insulated in his own
alt-reality that no response to him seems to matter.
"I’ve been thinking about September 2001 again because,
only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man
9/11."
Above all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all
those people who voted for Trump and even madder at the ones who didn’t vote at
all. I’m mad at everyone who thinks the sum total of their contribution to the
political well-being of this country is voting every two or four years. I’m mad
at our corporate-political system and how easily distracted people are. I’m
steaming mad, but mostly at myself.
Yep, I’m mad at myself and at the Obamas. They made empire look
so good! Their grace and intelligence, their obvious love for one another and
the way they telegraphed a certain approachability and reasonableness. So
attractive! They were fun -- or at least they looked like that on social media.
Michelle in the karaoke car with Missy Elliot
singing Beyoncé and talking about global girls' education! Barack and a tiny Superman at a White House Halloween
party. Michelle, unapologetically fierce after Trump’s demeaning Access
Hollywood comments came to light. I loved those
Obamas, despite my politics and my analysis. I was supposed to resist all his
efforts at world domination through drones and sweeping trade deals and
instead I fell a little bit in love, even as I marched and fasted and tried to
resist.
Falling in Love With My Country
Now, we have a new president. And my love is gone, along with my
admiration, my pride, and my secret wish to attend a state dinner and chat with
the Obamas over local wine and grass-fed beef sliders.
What’s not gone, though, what’s strangely stronger than ever, is
my love for this country.
I didn’t love the United States under Jimmy Carter or Ronald
Reagan or Bush the First. I was a kid and they were names on protest banners
and headlines in the news. My parents were the Catholic peace activists Liz
McAlister and Phil Berrigan, and I grew up in an anarchist collective of
Christian resisters. My parents and their friends went to jail repeatedly and
resolutely. We demonstrated, rallied, and railed at every
institution of power in Washington. Those presidents made the adults around me
angry and agitated, so they scared me.
I didn’t love the United States under Bill Clinton either -- I
was young and in college and opposed to everything -- nor under George W. Bush.
I was young and in New York City and still opposed to almost everything.
I started calling myself a “New Yorker” three years after moving
there when, on a sunny Tuesday morning, airplanes became weapons, tall towers
fell, and 3,000 people died. I emerged from my routine subway ride at 14th
Street, unaware and unscathed, to stand still with the rest of the city and
watch the sky turn black. I spent the rest of that day in Manhattan with
friends trying to reach my parents and following the news, as we all tried (and
failed) to come to grips with the new reality. Once the bridges reopened, we
walked home to Brooklyn that evening, terrified and shell-shocked.
9/11 provided the rationale for sweeping changes in Washington.
War by fiat, paid for in emergency supplementals that circumvented
Congressional processes; a new Department of Homeland Security (where did that
word “homeland” even come from?); a proliferation of increasingly muscular
intelligence agencies; and a new brand of “legal” scholarship that justified both
torture and indefinite detention, while tucking secret black sites away in foreign countries.
All this as the United States went to war against “terrorism” -- against, that is, an idea, a
fringe sentiment that, no matter how heavily weaponized, had been marginalized
until the United States put it on the map by declaring “war” on it.
The U.S. then invaded and occupied big time, including a country
that had nothing to do with the terrorists who had attacked us, and we’ve been
at war ever since at a heavy cost -- now inching toward $5 trillion. Conservative estimates of how
many people have been killed in the many war zones of what used to be called
the Global War on Terror is 1.3 to 2 million. The number of U.S. military
personnel who have lost their lives is easier to put a number to:more than 7,000,
butthat doesn’t count private contractors (aka mercenaries), or those (far more
difficult to quantify) who later committed suicide. Now, President Trump has
begun adding to this bloody death toll, having ordered his first (disastrous)
strike, a Special Operations raid on Yemen, which killed as many as 30 civilians, including children,
and resulted in the death of an American Navy SEAL as well.
September 11th was a long time ago. But I finally fell in love
with my country in the days following that awful attack. I saw for the first
time a certain strain of patriotism that swept me away, a strain that says we
are stronger together than alone, stronger than any blow that strikes us,
stronger in our differences, stronger in our unities. I’m talking about the
kind of patriotism that said: don’t you dare tell us to go to Disney World, Mr.
President! (That was, of course, after George W. Bush had assured us that, while he made war, our
response as citizens to 9/11 should be to “get down to Disney World in
Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be
enjoyed.”)
Instead of heeding that lame advice, some of us went out and
began to try to solve problems and build community. I had read about it in
books -- the labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the civil rights
movement of the 1950s and 1960s -- but I hadn’t seen it myself, hadn’t been a
part of it before, and I fell in love.
Of course, the drumbeat for war started instantly in Washington
and was echoed throughout the nation, but many of us -- the intended victims of
that attack -- said “our grief is not a cry for war.” We circled around the
victims’ families; we reminded America that it wasn’t only lawyers and
hedge-fund managers who died that day, but cooks and couriers and homeless
people and undocumented immigrants, too.
We pulled people from the rubble. We made the “pile” a
place of sacred memory long before a huge monument and gift shop were erected
there. We honored the first responders who died, we stood up for Muslims
and Arabs and all those whom ignorance scapegoated. We marched against
war in Afghanistan and then in far vaster numbers against war in Iraq. We
called for an international police response to those acts of terrorism -- that
weapon of the weak, not the powerful -- instead of the unilateral, militarized
approach adopted by the Bush administration. We celebrated, and saw as a
strength, New York’s incredible diversity. We made art and music and poetry. We
prayed in all languages to all the names of God.
The Donald, a One-Man 9/11
I guess I’ve been thinking about September 2001 again because,
only weeks into his presidency, Donald Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11.
He’s ridden roughshod over business as usual without even a geopolitical crisis
or calamity as an excuse -- and that’s not so surprising since Trump himself is
that calamity.
With a razor-thin mandate, considerable bluster, and a voracious
appetite for alt-facts (lies), he’s not so much tipping over the apple
cart as declaring war on apples, carts, and anything else beginning with the
letter A or C.
It seems almost that random and chaotic. In these weeks, he’s
shown a particular appetite for upending convention, saying screw you to just
about everyone and everything, while scrapping the rules of decorum and
diplomacy. With a sweep of his pen and a toss of his hair, he takes away visas, nullifies months of
work by advocates for refugees, and sends U.S. Special Forces off to kill and be killed. With a few twitches of
his thumbs he baits Mexico, disses China, and throws shade at federal judges. With a few ill-chosen words
about Black History month (comments that would
have been better written by my 10 year old), he resurrects Frederick Douglass,
disparages inner cities, and slams the “dishonest” media
again (and again and again). His almost-month as president can be described as
busy and brash, but it barely hides the banality of greed.
Flying Our Flag
Sure, Donald Trump’s a new breed, but perhaps in the end our
resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new
normal. So many of his acts are aimed at demeaning, degrading, demonizing, and
denigrating, but he’s already failing -- by driving so many of us to a new
radical patriotism. I’m not the only one falling in love with this country
again and this love looks like resistance -- a resistance that, from the first
moments of the Trump era, has seemed to be almost everywhere you looked.
"Sure, Donald Trump’s a new breed, but perhaps in the end
our resistance will make him the aberration he should be, rather than the new
normal."
Even at his inauguration, a group of young people stood on
chairs wearing matching sweatshirts spelling out R-E-S-I-S-T in big letters. They had
positioned themselves in the inner ring of the Capitol and were loud and visible
as Chief Justice John Roberts swore the new president into office. The
environmental group Greenpeace greeted Trump’s White House
with a daring banner drop from a crane across
the street -- a huge, bright banner also emblazoned with RESIST. Pink woolen
“pussy hats” were popularized by the Women’s March, a global event and possibly
the largest demonstration in American
history,one that rekindled our hope and strengthened our resolve on
inauguration weekend. Now, those hats help us recognize and salute one another.
We are, in short, resisting in old ways and new.
Given my background, it’s no surprise that I’m not a flag waver.
While growing up, I learned a lot more about what was wrong with my country
than about what was right with it. But I’m seeing so much that’s right about it
in this new Trump era of engagement or, if you prefer, call it radical
patriotism. I’m mad... I’m scared... I’m hopeful... I’m still in love -- more
so than ever -- with this country Trump is trying to hijack.
I don’t live in a big city any more. I’m not a scrappy kid in my
early thirties either. I’m a mother of three kids and a homeowner. I’ve sunk my
roots in a small, struggling, stalwart community along Connecticut’s eastern
shoreline and I’m planning to live here for the rest of my life.
New London is a community of 27,000 or
so, poor and diverse. It’s almost a majority-minority community, in fact.
We’re home to three refugee families settled from Syria and
Sudan. We have a good school system, getting better all the time. Every
Wednesday, the chefs at the middle school up the street
from my house cook a meal, open the cafeteria, and invite the whole community
to eat dinner for five dollars per person. I went with my girls a couple of
weeks ago for Cajun shrimp stew and white rice. The room was full and the mood
was high. Young professionals and hipsters with kids ate alongside folks who
had just stood in line for an hour and a half for a free box of food from the
United Way across the street and gotten a free meal coupon as well for their
troubles.
New London’s mayor held a press conference soon after in the
lobby of City Hall where the heads of all the city departments asserted their
support for immigrants and refugees in our community. The last city council
meeting was standing room only as people pushed an ordinance to keep fracking waste out of our area.
The weekend after the inauguration, my husband and I raised a
flagpole on the second story porch of our house and hung a rainbow peace flag
from it. I look up at it every morning waving in the breeze and I’m glad I live
here, in this country, in this moment of radical upsurge and a new spirit of
patriotism.
I’m talking to my neighbors. I’m going to city council meetings.
I’m writing letters to the editor of our local paper.
I’m taking my Sudanese neighbors grocery shopping and to the post office. I’m
loaded for bear (nonviolently, of course) if anyone tries to mess with them.
My kids are the anti-Trumps. “We went to the women’s march in
Hartford, Mommy,” two-year-old Madeline shouts every time she hears the
word woman. She knows enough to be proud of that. “Look, Mommy!
They have a flag like ours!” says four-year-old Seamus with delight whenever he
sees another rainbow, even if it’s just a sticker. He’s learning to recognize
our tribe of patriots.
We’re engaged, we’re awake, we’re in love, and no one is taking
our country from us.
© 2017 Frida Berrigan
Frida Berrigan, a columnist for WagingNonviolence.org, serves
on the board of the War Resisters League and
organizes with Witness Against Torture.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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