Patriotism and Election Year Blues

To the kind woman who called me today to hear my political views: I'm sorry. You called at a bad time. The baby was fussing, I was about to get in the shower, I was still stewing about two recent frustrating interactions... and it's an election year. Can you try calling back when I can be more reasoned in my response to your questions?  Because if you did, I might tell you this:

One summer when I was still young and observing American culture like the outsider I was, I attended a church camp-out where leaders I respected sat around the campfire making jokes about leaders I knew they were supposed to respect.  They were disparaging, stopping only just shy of wishing evil on the man in the presidential office.

However old I was, I remember heading back to my tent as the campfire sank low and feeling sick.  What was this "great American country" and its "unsurpassed government system" that allowed for such vilification?  Not just in heated debates but seated around church campfires?

I wanted no part of it. I considered my home country to be Colombia, and yes, there raged a civil war, but at least the lines were very cut and dried: the rebels, those bent on destruction of life and peace for the sake of their moneyed drug trade; and everyone else. Naive, I know, but in Colombia I was never witness to heated political debate that made me wish for a quiet corner.

Conflict and I do not get a long.

The summer I traveled to Europe and was the only non-Dutch student on a field trip to Belgium, it wasn't the US flag that stirred my homesickness, but the Colombian.

Four years later I could no longer deny that my years in Colombia were now fewer than my years in the United States. I had also just finished a year of college--classical education modeled, in part, after the education received by the US Founding Fathers. I thought maybe it was time to cultivate some US patriotism.

I was helped with that effort by a particularly moving 4th of July musical performance. Music can do that, you know.

And two months later airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers and patriotism was "in". "We will never forget!" was a rallying cry, but it is human nature to forget. US flags flown from car windows slowly deteriorated off their poles to flip-flop in the wind like dying fish on the road side or were replaced by a favorite team flag for game day.

That wasn't the kind of patriotism I wanted and so what little I had languished again. I voted more out of a sense of duty (okay, and maybe fear of shunning should certain friends and family happen to find out), than any belief that my vote meant anything.

Skepticism, cynicism, criticism, and outright opposition, add a little arrogance and that's the American way? No thank you. I'll skip the patriotism, thankyouverymuch.

Then my beloved patriotic husband set off to show me his beloved United States.  And twenty-five states (and the District of Columbia) later, I know there is far more. Eavesdropping on the Constitutional Convention in Independence Hall, peering at the Star Spangled Banner that inspired the Anthem, walking Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg... the governing of this country has never been free of debate in the best of times and fighting at the worst.

But for the love of God and Country, this current madness we call the election year... isn't there a better way?