Global Patriotism

It’s been a week of heavy breathing and interrupted sleep, what with the 100 meter dash and the various watery relays, not to mention the race for the vice-presidential nomination. 

Right now my body is holding days of vaulting, dashing, and butterflying, as well as a great deal of flag-waving and orgies of American exceptionalism. Don’t get me wrong. It’s astonishing to see these people do what they can do. To refer to me as a human being and use the same words to describe Katie Ledecky or Simone Biles is to mess with the specificity of language in a way that makes the words seem meaningless. And there’s more of it in the pipeline. More stories of illnesses overcome, of redemption sagas played out in red, white and blue on an international stage. Of course, I don’t have to watch it but that’s sort of like saying no one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to eat a second piece of chocolate cake. It’s there and you want it, but it takes its toll.  

Photo by Luísa Schetinger on Unsplash

It turns out that much as I like a good triple double whatever, I have no talent for nationalism. It’s not in my DNA. So I watch the Olympics against a backdrop of some faint shame. I know I’m supposed to support the Americans, but I find that I’m rooting for Julien Alfred, the sprinter from St. Lucia whose win is celebrated by a gaggle of delirious people on the beach in the Caribbean. I find that I experience a little shiver of delight when the Romanian swimmer, David Popovici, takes the gold. He reminds me of my grandparents in Iasi. Rooting is in the gut. You don’t decide it in your prefrontal cortex. It just happens. All that Team USA stuff goes against the grain for me. Here’s the deal, as Joe Biden would say. There are Yankee fans and there are Red Sox fans. I was a Red Sox fan long before 2004. It is my nature to root for the underdog and I like it like that.

Still, in this country, there is a growing mass of people whose patriotism is making music in a new key. It’s not us, we’re the best, USA USA!. It’s a global patriotism. It asks the question…how can we as Americans be part of the movement to save the earth from climate disaster and prevent the world from lapsing into autocracy. Two nights ago, I moved from the Olympics on NBC to my computer screen to be part of a zoom call of Elders for Kamala. I’m an elder now! Bill McKibben, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Terry Tempest Williams and Rebecca Solnit, not to mention Jane Fonda, Bernie Sanders and John Kerry, stepped up and spoke passionately about climate and how we have an obligation both to our ancestors who brought us to the party and our descendants who are inheriting this exquisite fragile and wounded world. Their appeal was to a patriotism that recognizes our place in the great chain of being, both in time and in space. Bernie spoke of the sacrifices made by our parents in World War II and contributions made by our generation, his generation, during the civil rights era and the struggle against the Vietnam War. Climate consciousness is the very essence of a global patriotism that sees the ocean becoming increasingly polluted and the water’s edge rising. This planetary awareness understands that the suffering of the earth does not end at the water’s edge or the borders of any one country. 

Now we have a vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, the very progressive governor of my new home state, Minnesota. Walz identifies himself as a Minnesota Lutheran and explains that that means if he does something good, he’s not allowed to tell anyone about it. Imagine the conjunction of humility with leadership. It’s a new day. As if to practice this new and unfamiliar down-to-earth Americanism, Frank and I went to a cook-out yesterday that was part of National Night Out. For the uninitiated, National Night Out is a tradition of neighborhood gatherings in mid-summer where local public figures sometimes grab a hot dog with constituents. It was a perfect night for non-competitive potato salad eating, chowing down on veggie burgers and the old-fashioned kind straight off the grill. Two earnest young people in day-glo vests representing the department of public works joined us. And for a moment in Minnesota, we were not anxious, not trying to beat someone else to the finish line. We were just glad to be alive and be citizens of the world.

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