From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Why the American Left Embodies the True Spirit of Patriotism
Date July 5, 2020 12:00 AM
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[Don’t mistake the showy right-wing flag-waving and loud
anthem-singing for patriotism. True patriotism resides with people who
hope and believe that this country is capable of living up to the
values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.]
[[link removed]]

WHY THE AMERICAN LEFT EMBODIES THE TRUE SPIRIT OF PATRIOTISM  
[[link removed]]


 

Amanda Marcotte / Salon
July 3, 2020
AlterNet
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Don’t mistake the showy right-wing flag-waving and loud
anthem-singing for patriotism. True patriotism resides with people who
hope and believe that this country is capable of living up to the
values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. _

Protesting the murder of George Floyd, Washington DC, Ted
Eytan//[link removed]

 

Of the many images that flowed out of Ferguson, Missouri, during the
2014 Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in response to the
police shooting Michael Brown, by far the most iconic is Robert
Cohen’s photo of Edward Crawford throwing a tear gas canister. The
police had fired the canister at the protesters: In a series of
photos that won him a Pulitzer Prize
[[link removed]],
Cohen captured Crawford rushing forward, scooping up the flaming
canister up, and throwing it back at police.

The image was arresting for many reasons: Crawford’s stirring
courage, the brightness of the flames, the fierce pitcher’s posture
that Crawford struck as he protected protesters from the tear gas. But
one undeniable aspect of the photograph’s power is that Crawford
is clad in an American flag shirt.

As the podcast “Criminal” recently documented
[[link removed]],
the image was printed on T-shirts and turned into murals, and it’s
not hard to see why. Crawford’s actions spoke to a certain strain of
American patriotism, the kind that rejects the history of white
supremacy and demands that this country live up to its stated ideals
of equality, freedom and justice.

Crawford passed away in 2017
[[link removed]],
in what authorities believe was a suicide but some family members and
activists deem suspicious. His spirit lives on in the growing Black
Lives Matter protest movement. As much as the morally empty talking
heads at Fox News may rant and rave about how the protests are a
threat to America, in truth, this movement is being driven by true
patriots who are putting their safety on the line in order to save
this country from its worst impulses.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and his media sycophants have decided to make
a cause out of defending Confederate iconography
[[link removed]],
lashing out at protesters who tear down statutes honoring Confederate
military leaders and freaking out at demands that military bases
currently named after treasonous rebels be renamed — possibly after
actual American heroes.

Conservatives love to imagine themselves as American patriots and cast
progressives in the role of some sort of Fifth Column, but let’s
look at the facts. It’s not progressives who are adamantly defending
statues honoring people who literally committed treason against the
U.S. in the name of defending slavery. It’s progressives who
demanding we tear the statues of those traitors down in the name of
creating “a more perfect union.”

It’s not a novel argument, of course, to point out that American
history has always been rife with the cognitive dissonance between our
stated ideals of equality and freedom and our actual lived realities,
far too often defined more by bigotry and drastic inequality. We were
founded by men like Thomas Jefferson who wrote highfalutin words
about all men being equal and then return to plantations staffed with
enslaved people.

Most of the time, Americans just live, however uneasily, with that
dissonance, much in the way we have statues of actual heroes
like Standing Bear
[[link removed]] and Helen Keller
[[link removed]] standing uneasily in
the National Statuary Hall
[[link removed]] next to
bonafide historical villains like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Sometimes, however, the dissonance between our ideals and our reality
becomes too great to bear and Americans are presented with a stark
choice between white supremacy and our image of ourselves as
freedom-loving people. Unfortunately, every time such a test arises,
far too many Americans value racist impulses over loyalty to America
and what it supposedly stands for.

That was true in the Civil War, when white Southerners decided they
liked slavery better than they liked being Americans. That was true
during the civil rights struggle, when so many white Americans decided
they were more invested in segregation than the literal words of the
Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal.

We are living through another such time when Americans are being
forced to choose between our stated ideals and the implicit codes of
white supremacy. Sadly, many white Americans are yet again being
disloyal to the country they claim to love in standing with Trump,
a man who has no love or loyalty to this country, no matter how many
times he play-acts the patriot with his flag-hugging or pretending to
sing along to the national anthem.

Trump looked the other way when Russia was paying bounties to kill
American soldiers
[[link removed]].
He pardons war criminals and leaves those who tried to serve with
honor
[[link removed]] to
die or watch their lives fall apart. He tear-gassed peaceful
protesters 
[[link removed]]exercising
their First Amendment rights because he thought it would look cool for
a photo shoot. Trump “joked” (he doesn’t actually joke) with
Russian president Vladimir Putin that he would like to “get rid
of” journalists
[[link removed]],
something Putin has accomplished with murder. Trump not only did
nothing substantive when a pandemic started to sweep across the
nation, infecting millions and killing more than 130,000 (so far), he
actively fought anyone who was trying to take measures to protect
Americans, repeatedly trying to block or limit expanded testing,
lockdowns or the simple wearing of masks.

Taken together, it’s clear that Trump not only doesn’t care one
bit about this country, its people or its ideals, he’s really a
man who hates America and the people who live in it. The only real
reason anyone would support him is because they love racism more than
they love America.

Early on in Barack Obama’s presidency, I took a vacation to Paris
with a friend. Standing on a street corner, a man asked me, in French,
for directions. I apologized and told him I didn’t speak French.

“American?” he replied.

I said yes, and the teen girl standing on the sidewalk next to me
raised her hands in the air and shouted, “Yes we can!”

That girl’s enthusiasm just made me chuckle at the time, and there
was certainly an element of deliberate goofiness to her exclamation.

But now that pierces me through the heart. That enthusiasm speaks to
me now about why we’re seeing Black Lives Matter turn into a global
phenomenon, where even countries that have no real relationship to the
United States’ history of colonialism, racism and slavery are still
bearing witness with enormous solidarity marches. People around the
world are rooting for the protesters, and for progressives generally,
not just because they hate Trump, but because they believe in us.

They believe Americans are capable, in this time when our choices have
become so stark, of choosing the right path in this conflict between
the values we espouse and the white supremacist views held by our
president. It’s incredibly sweet. I don’t know that we deserve
their support, but I hope we can live up to their expectations.

So don’t mistake the showy right-wing flag-waving and loud
anthem-singing for patriotism. The true patriotism resides with people
who hope and believe that this country is still capable of living up
to the values enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. If that
wasn’t obvious before, what we’re living through now has made that
truth self-evident.

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
Screenshot of the email generated on import

Message Analysis

  • Sender: Portside
  • Political Party: n/a
  • Country: United States
  • State/Locality: n/a
  • Office: n/a
  • Email Providers:
    • L-Soft LISTSERV