Sunday Essay: On America, and Love

The original date of publication for this essay is Sunday, July 4^th. It is the 51^st of a year’s worth of essays, published on Sundays.

Last week’s essay: On My Non-Magnificence

There’s a definition of love that says you need to see someone as they are to love them. That if you’re tinting your glasses or catching just a glimpse and filling in the blanks, you’re only loving your conception of them, not the person themself. You’re loving someone imaginary. Someone who doesn’t actually exist.

I’m not sure how well I know America. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to meet it, but what a vast thing to try to know. Five years ago, I took about four months and drove the continental states. Before that, on choir tours in college, I traversed it by coach bus, staying in strangers’ homes. Before that, there were the frequent travels with my family—I think I’d at least passed through 44 states by the time I graduated high school—and the chance encounters, like a week spent playing baseball in Roseland, a neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. The chance encounters continue. I spent some time in Findlay, Ohio a few years back. I’ve gotten to know San Marcos, Texas a bit.

One of the effects, for better or worse, of seeing so much of America geographically, at least in this past decade, is that I’ve become rather protective of it, and rather opinionated on how to love it.

There’s a conception of America that limits it to the Norman Rockwell version, or to hot dogs and apple pie and [insert cliché of your choosing]. I grew up in this portion of America. I grew up in a mid-size town in the Midwest with a lake towards its northwest corner. We had a good little league. We had good public schools. We had a big festival every year on the weekend of the Fourth of July. My hometown strikes hard the chords of Americana, right down to the immigrant families grilling out at the public beach on the lake’s eastern shore.

This postcard portion, though, is not all of America, and despite having taken on that “Americana” name, it’s not any more American than the rest of this land. It’s an easy slice of it, but far from the only slice, and like this nation in all its forms it’s riddled with tragedies and sins and promises not yet fulfilled. Two kids I played baseball with are dead from opioids. Depression, named and unnamed, was rampant in my high school. A squabble over gay marriage tore great clumps of the congregation off of my then-160 year-old church when I was in grade school. But it’s easy to forget all that when the water’s as blue as the sky and the water tower’s poking out above the treetops that encircle the lake.

I often do love America, admittedly, in clichés. I love Chicago’s might. I love those old country roads through Mississippi. I love the gentle roll of the West Virginian hills. I love the faded industry of Greensboro. I love the simple smallness of Wilmington. I love the vast magic of Navajo Nation. I love the way the water meets the rocks on the Minnesotan coast. I love the lowlands in South Carolina, and the high land out west in South Dakota, and the sparse lands south of Norman in Oklahoma. I love those long, straight drives down by the Everglades; and those cool, comfortable drives winding through Maine; and that stretch of interstate in the Cascades where you can catch a sight of a freight train next to you beneath snow-capped peaks. I love D.C. on a spring morning, and Blacksburg on an autumn afternoon, and Lake Champlain under an orange sunset sky. I love the oasis that is Zion, and the rustic thrill of the Smokies, and the absolute perfection of Saint Mary Lake. I love the way Little Rock looks when you cross the bridge into downtown during the golden hour, and the way New York sounds when Central Park’s getting piled with snow, and the way it feels to pull into a gas station west of Selma way after dark and find the men of whichever small town you’re in gathered there holding court with one another. I love Atlanta’s curious hustle, and Detroit’s dreams of a comeback, and the absurdity of everything and everyone on the Strip in Las Vegas. I’ve looked up and been startled by El Capitan. I’ve wanted to sob listening to an electric violin at the corner of Bourbon and Canal Streets. I’ve eaten pho at a little place in Fairfield and I loved these things too. We went to Hawaii when I was five, and I’ve got a jar of dirt on my desk from the family homestead out near Sioux City, and something about the boundless joy of the Indy 500 makes me happy for that city when the race comes around to kick off every summer. I love the easy kindness of Fargo, and the natural rowdiness of Wisconsin, and the eyeroll-worthy hilarity of Ohiocentrism. I’ve been breathless at Gettysburg, and I’ve been breathless on the Oregon coast, and I’ve been breathless watching little streams pass little cabins on their way to becoming big rivers up in the Rockies. I’m enamored with the quaint, neat streets of Princeton; and so fond of those times when Omaha can be so deferentially self-aware; and I keep a little Christmas ornament on my dashboard of the big old church in the square in Santa Fe because I prayed there once and the place held me. I love the Tetons, and the Flint Hills, and the ancient and old Ozarks. I love Baltimore’s humble beauty, and Kentucky’s pastoral beauty, and the way the waters dance in Couer d’Alene. I’m at peace in the Texas Hill Country, and in a bookstore in Portsmouth, and on the timeless shores of Cape Cod. I love little Rhode Island, half sea itself, and God oh God please let me reach Alaska before I die, because I love a big sky and I can’t picture one bigger.

But I also know how bloodstained these places are, from Jamestown to Cup Foods. I know we’re a “nation of immigrants” because we damn near exterminated the people who were here first. I know the railroads were built on the bones of Chinese laborers. I know kids are dying of thirst in the desert, trying to make it here. I know that in the 30’s and 40’s, paralyzed by fear, this country turned away boat after boat of people thus destined for gas chambers. I know children in this country would rather die and are so painfully often choosing to die than to live in a cultural conflict over a piece so core to who they are, and so very hard.

You can’t ignore these things. You can’t ignore the sins. You can’t ignore the tragedies. You can’t place these things all in the past when they are not all in the past. They continue, and their effects continue, and there are things that can be made right and things that can’t be made right but just because the latter exists doesn’t mean you must throw your hands up and pretend all is well. All is not well. You can acknowledge that. You can acknowledge something is wrong and acknowledge something is unfixable and strive for grace in the midst of it. You’re allowed to do your best.

It’s ok to love the flag, and the Sousa marches, and the hot dogs and apple pies and Bud Light commercials followed by Ford commercials. Those things are worthy of love (well, most of the commercials are worthy of love). But they’re just filmy things, surface things, products of America rather than things integral to America’s core. If you’re going to love the country, and I’m saying actually love it, you need to love deeper than that. You need to love the sinful parts too, and the tragic parts too, and that means recognizing them for what they are. That means recognizing that those things are bad enough that some people will not, because of them, love this country, and giving space for that even if some of those people delude themselves about what’s possible and about what exists elsewhere in the world. That means recognizing that “continuous progress” isn’t enough—and that it’s temptingly easy to call it enough when you’re not the one who will benefit from the continuation, and that it’s ok to say that this is the fastest we can go but that oh God…if only we could go faster, and if only we could go back and make things right, and if only and if only and if only. And that means recognizing that we are wrong about so many things right now, and we don’t know all of them, but we know some of them, and there’s that line between grace and accountability that we must find with both ourselves and our cultural and physical ancestors.

There’s a definition of love that says that if you love someone, you should invest yourself in their betterment. That doesn’t mean, in most instances, seizing control. But it does mean that loving someone includes loving their flawed self, and not accepting the flaws within that self that are not acceptable.

America is not yet what it should be. It will likely never be that. Who fulfills their potential? That’s not something human beings or human institutions can do. But what America should be is such a wonderful thing, and a thing so worthy of pursuit: A land where all can rise and pursue their happiness, where people can come from afar and feel justified hope in their journey, where there can one day be found a place where those who were here first are treated with the respect due those who were here first.

There can be no “but” in this statement: America is flawed, and I love it. But seeing those flaws is part of the love. And seeking their remedy is part of the love.

God bless it.

God save it.

And as that line in the national scripture goes:

God mend its every flaw.

Next week’s essay: On Suicide and on Remaining