When I was a kid, my family lived in New England — Connecticut and Massachusetts, specifically. My father was a born-and-bred Yankee from the northwest part of Massachusetts, while my mother came from Alabama stock. (A long, entertaining, but irrelevant story.)
Many weekends when I was no more than 5 or 6, my parents would bundle me and my younger sister into the car and take us to historical sites, such as Lexington and Concord, and Old Deerfield, where the “Deerfield Massacre” took place in 1704, and tell us we were their descendants. When I whined that I was bored, my mother would lecture me about the importance of history, about how the United States was a special place and it was my responsibility to know what made it special.
Mom was a John Birch Society (!) Republican, not that I knew what that meant. Dad was a run-of-the-mill business Republican. They both revered America’s roots, though. So from as early as I can remember, I was steeped in active GOP politics, as a tangible demonstration of love of country. Mom got involved in local party activities, which expanded over the years into statewide activities, and she dragooned me and my sister into campaign activities — stuffing envelopes and putting stamps on, handing out flyers, waving signs, going to candidate speeches, etc.
When we watched the Olympics, I thought the “Star Spangled Banner” was the best national anthem of all the countries’ songs. My eyes would tear up and I’d get a lump in my throat as we sang along, sitting in our living room in front of the TV.
So the late ‘60s and early ‘70s were hell on our family dynamic. Both my parents uncritically supported the Vietnam War, and thought the hippies and protesters were scumbag anarchists determined to bring down the country. These were my high school years, though; between normal teenage rebellion and all the cultural influences I was embracing — rock ‘n’ roll!! — dinnertime turned into ferocious battles over the meaning of patriotism.
Then came Watergate. By that time our family had grown (hi, baby sister) and we had moved to Rockville, Md., where my dad was working … as a lobbyist! and my mother was a volunteer with the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP, as it was called).
(Here I could go into a long digression about my family’s direct personal connection to the scandal. But I will resist the temptation.)
So by the time Nixon resigned, I was an unabashed Democrat. For decades my parents ascribed it to my simply rejecting them — their choices, their logic, their values. Talking to Mom and Dad inevitably devolved into a heated conversation about politics. I got much more informed about events, and gave as good as I got. We eventually just stopped talking about politics, realizing that neither side was going to change the other.
And my overt sense of patriotism waned. Hearing the national anthem no longer gave me goosebumps. I voted in presidential elections, and usually — but not always — in the midterms.
Fast-forward to November 9, 2016. Both of my parents are gone. (There had been some change in their attitudes in the intervening years — Mom was growing increasingly dismayed at what she saw the GOP becoming, because it violated her understanding of America’s special qualities, while Dad was simply cynical about the whole exercise.)
When the Orange Menace was elected, I felt the same as everyone here at Daily Kos — dismayed, disgusted, angry (pick your own adjectives — I felt that, too). My husband and I came to Washington on Jan. 21, 2017, joining millions of people around the world to protest the disaster we could see coming.
Every single day since then, he and I have done something, anything, to fight back. It can be as invisible and inconsequential as recording the entire primetime lineup on MSNBC and watching the shows in fits and bursts. It might be as unimportant as yet another FB post ranting about Drumpf’s latest unconstitutional outrage. Sometimes — not as often as I’d like, but as often as I can — it’s protesting outside my Republican senator’s district office, or standing on a street corner demonstrating against a stupid, or short-sighted, or greedy, or bigoted decision our county commission has made.
It’s giving up long-time friends because they have gone to the dark side. It’s spending hours every day reading online, here and elsewhere, so that I can at least try to understand the vastness of the danger facing all of us.
It’s realizing that I have always loved my country. I have always wanted it to strive to live up to its ideals, the same ideals my parents were teaching me so many years ago. I have always accepted its flaws and imperfections, because WE KEEP TRYING.
So I realize I have always been a patriot.