Claiming Kinship: I Am A Patriot

I’ve spent some time today traveling the pages of the Americans Support You website that President Bush promoted in his speech last Tuesday, a site now receiving over 10,000 hits a second compared to just over a hundred hits a second before Tuesday’s speech. The Center for Media and Democracy writer Laura Miller compliments the site for the support it is and for the forum it provides in an exchange of sentiment between citizens of our nation and “Any Serviceman,” a type of correspondence no longer allowed through the postal mail service. Ms. Miller goes on to question, however, the underlying motivation for the site, wondering aloud whether or not the site is intentionally composed as a kind of public promotion tool supporting U.S. involvement in Iraq. Clearly, organizations mentioned on the site, messages exchanged, images, and the stories reported present a very one-sided and idealized picture of the war. Americans are searching for a way to continue to understand the war and their part in it as noble, reflecting American ideals and character, and, perhaps above all, justified by the support of the people back home. The site provides no forum to suggest that the war in Iraq is not a noble realization of high ideals, insisting instead that the morale of soldiers depends on maintaining an illusionary construction of hope anchored in the belief of honor and integrity. The website built for support serves to encourage soldiers but does so, perhaps, at the cost of a more balanced representation of national and global sentiment.

I was playing tennis last week, and one of the women on the court asked where Tommi was. I said she was about 10 miles north of Baghdad right now and went on to vent a measure of the pressure I’d been feeling over shifting sentiments of personal politics. She responded with compassion appropriate to the moment then suggested I start a support group for parents “dealing with these kinds of difficulties.” Her words have been with me for more than a week now … a support group? The idea seems to imply that only a few of us are directly effected by “these kinds of problems,” that parents of soldiers could get together for weekly meetings and feel better for talking productively through the national shame that daily threatens to take the lives of their children. The rest of us can post a few words in an email to “Any Soldier” on a Fourth of July weekend.

What bothers me about all of this is the pressing difficulty to harmonize the support I mean to maintain for every single one of the sondaughter/soldiers being s(p)ent to fight this war – including and especially my daughter, Tommi – with my certain and absolute conviction that the war we have taken to Iraq is an intolerable and immoral act. This difficulty is common to many Americans right now but particularly evident for the parents of men and women serving or lost to the war in Iraq: Be proud of your child, they are told, as of course they are, and do this at the same time you know that what your child is being made to do in the name of nation, service, and duty is devastatingly wrong.

On his website Mr. Bush suggests that “patriotism” be narrowly defined, a descriptive held in reserve only for those who speak approvingly of his war. I do not agree. I am a patriot. My daughter is a patriot. We love our country. Further, I am desperately proud of every American citizen/soldier upholding the Constitution of the United States. This July 4^th, from a boat on the lake faithfully launched to safeguard the remembrance of traditions that keep my daughter company while she’s away at war, I will join other Minnesotans gathered along the shore of Lake Bemidji and celebrate with fireworks while I catch myself up in singing “I’m proud to be an American …”. It will be true – completely true, but more importantly, this Fourth of July I will claim kinship with PATRIOTS – those who gave us this country, that band of believers who secured independence against an opportunistic and corrupt government by saying, “No. Not one inch more! THIS is where injustice stops and accountability begins – upon my life!” And I will mean it with my life every bit as much today as they meant it with theirs then.

Happy Fourth of July, Tommi. I’ve got you.

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