The Reluctant Patriot

I’ve read that Canadians are coming together with one voice to defend their country against the aggressive posturing from the south. From Quebec to Vancouver, they understand the threat to their sovereignty and are pausing to express their love for Canada and their refusal to roll over for the bully in the White House. For the first time in almost eighty years, I also find myself experiencing an unfamiliar wave of patriotic feeling. Among the many responses I’ve been having in the month since the coup, my discovery that I love my country has been one of the most powerful and revelatory. I find myself feeling protective like a parent, filled with love and anxiety about the wellbeing of her child. I’m worried about the people who have been driven out of their homes by ICE, the people who have lost their jobs, the farmers who are helpless to prevent their crops designated for shipment abroad from rotting on the docks, and the older people like myself fearful for the future of Social Security and Medicare. I love the people I saw protesting in the street in Sacramento and the thousands of others throughout our country.

Sacramento February 17, 2025

Parenting is always a delicate balance between love and limit-setting. Americans have fallen in with a bad crowd. Part of the population on November 5th just wanted to have a good time at everyone else’s expense. Low taxes. Less regulation. A free-for-all. A license to prioritize greed and violence. America is in desperate need of wise and committed guidance and, as we all know, parenting is the hardest job there is. To do this job well, we will have to be supportive, helping to feed and clothe people when federal money is withdrawn, for example. But we will also have to be tough. We will have to say no. Our country is sick, out of control, and will need a lot of loving care, but it will also need us to set limits and each of us has some part to play.

Think of it as your job. In some ways, it’s very part-time. Every day, you go to work and spend fifteen minutes making calls to the Congressional switchboard or a half hour writing a letter to the editor of your local paper. In other ways, it’s full-time and then some as you think about the pervasive horror of the world according to Trump. There are no days when you don’t think about your children and how you might contribute to their welfare. There are no days when you don’t think about your country. You think about it when you rise up and when you lie down, in the car, cooking dinner. On Monday, I went to Sacramento to participate in the President’s Day demonstration at the California Capitol. It was a peaceful, entirely uneventful afternoon that featured toddlers, young parents and a great many older people waving signs that said Stop the Coup, We Are Better Than This and, my personal favorite, Ikea Has Better Cabinets. I got home exhausted but very glad I went. Then a few hours later I broke down and wept for no apparent reason while making tofu with garlic and ginger. There’s a lot of crying involved in parenting plus it’s hard work with no compensation but you know you have to do it because you’re a citizen and it’s your job. It doesn’t matter if each act of resistance is minuscule and feels like it’s unfolding a million miles from the seat of power. It doesn’t matter that you’re not really an activist by nature and you’re not at all sure that any of this means anything. It’s still deeply important to access the part of yourself that resonates with dissent and, if you’re 80-ish like I am, to remember yourself at sixteen, or thirty, when your blood was always heating up on the power burner.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the Jewish socialists and trade unionists who fought for the rights of working people before the Israel-Palestine question took center stage and, most recently, the war in Gaza generated suspicion of Jews on the Left. I need to identify with the strength of those old lefty landsmen of my youth. I.F. Stone comes to mind. It’s hard enough to resist the current violations of our personhood. It becomes much more difficult without the example of our courageous forebears. I hear them affirming that dissent is a patriotic tradition that withers on the vine unless it’s watered by new generations. It won’t be much, but I will do what I can. I will try to access the wisdom and strength of previous generations and pass it along to young Americans who will have to live in this decadent and dangerous environment a lot longer than I will.

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