What is Patriotism?

"...Patriotism can be defined as love of one's country, identification with it, 

and special concern for its well-being and that of compatriots." 

From: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/patriotism/

The issue of patriotism has been rolling around my head for years now, and something I've been wanting to flesh out and examining for over a decade.  Somewhere around the second year of college I began to question the idea that we should all walk around thinking 'America' might not be the absolute most lofty and perfect country in the universe. First off, America is not a country, so stop referring to it that way, fellow compatriots. You know who you are, and furthermore, if you have any reliable education whatsoever about geography, you should really know better. America is a continent. Two continents, actually, with a thin isthmus connecting them, and ancient land bridge that allowed people from Asia to come and populate its lands. Our country is called The United States of America. It's ok. We can share America.

Anyway, I digress. So once I started questioning the superiority of the United States in everything and also realized our citizens are not always the best at everything, I started to ask myself what it means to be patriotic, and decided I could still be patriotic and non-arrogant at the same time. For me, patriotism largely means lawfully doing what is good for the people, protecting the interest of the vulnerable in society even if it is costly, and being motivated out of love and respect for everyone in the society (as opposed to money interests, etc).

I was involved in a very interesting conversation on Facebook recently about President Barack Obama and his preference to pledge allegiance to the flag with his hand over his heart or without his hand over his heart. He apparently prefers to not hold his hand over his heart most of the time - to the chagrin of many a self-identified patriot. This issue apparently energizes the anti-Obama (largely conservative) base to the extent that if you Google this, hundreds of articles, news stories, and blog posts, have been written and commented on. Hundreds! These writers inform us that the issue, when you get right down to it, is quite complex. 1. There's the issue about whether he uses the hand at all, and 2. the secondary issue of whether he sometimes uses the hand and other times does not (which implies he is wishy-washy and a horrible unpatriotic president), and 3. the issue of whether the pictures showing he actually uses his LEFT hand to salute the flag (the horror!!) has been Photoshopped because it appears that in these photos, Mr. and Mrs. Obama are wearing their wedding bands on their right hands, so obviously the image has been flipped and published to smear the president's reputation. Yes...very complicated indeed.

Let's zoom out now. Let's remember that all these articles and stories have been published during the worst economic crisis since the Depression of the 20th Century. And we wonder why the Republicans can't seem to get it together enough to produce a viable candidate (because, come on - do we really think Romney is in a position to win this thing? I could be wrong but he's about as attractive in this election as a detached, Wall Street Millionaire in a 'post-recession' economy with high unemployment...oh wait...). This issue, along with the Obama-was-not-born-in-the-USA conversation (Dear Governor of Hawaii, we think you are lying and that's not the REAL birth certificate showing Obama's birth in America), has sure taken up a lot of the time of the conservative base's individuals. Maybe these have been distractions that take the focus off the important issues, such as reversing women's health care initiatives, and making sure we sink as much money as possible into many easily - hoppable fences along the border that pretty much succeed in only keeping animals from moving across the boundary. 

Alright, alright (Dammit I digress AGAIN!!). I'll tone it down. I know the sarcasm isn't very helpful. My point is, it's interesting to look at what we define as patriotic. It seems like many times, we use symbolic expression as a yardstick to measure the level of someone's patriotism, and sometimes we judge someone's patriotism on which leaders they support. So then, do we see our leaders as symbolic? I would say yes. I just did that with Romney in the last paragraph. We often choose our leaders based on the sectors of society they intrinsically represent, whether that be business, the working class, etc.  Do we expect our leaders to display the appropriate symbolic gestures that demonstrate they are 'all in' and committed to the country? Obviously, yes - that is the nature of politics, particularly when we don't have direct access to our leaders and have little information on which to base our assumptions about these leaders' motives.

The real question should be, though, how will we define patriotism in this era where appearances are increasingly easy to fake? Is a display of public symbolic allegiance patriotic enough?  (If this is the case, Hugo Chavez and the late Kim Jung Il are VERY patriotic!)? Is someone who wages war, however improperly, on behalf of the nation's benefit patriotic (George Bush and Dick Cheney come to mind - and perhaps even Obama for continuing the fight)? Is someone who engages in small acts for the public welfare patriotic (millions of unnamed activists protesting local labor injustices)? Is someone who preserves the past a patriot (historians)? What about someone pushing the country forward into the future (Steve Jobs)?

I don't know the answers to these questions yet. As for myself, I do not like putting my hand over my heart, and I do not think this makes me unpatriotic. This is in part because while I pledge allegiance to the country's peaceable, non-militaristic ideals, I cannot give my whole heart to any organization, even a national one. My full allegiance belongs only to God. I don't know why Obama chooses to hold back the hand sometimes, but if he feels as I do, that his allegiance is to a higher power, that is fine with me. I will not judge him for it. In the end, I will choose to allow a person's actions for the good of our people to prove the person's motives - whether they can show they have "love of one's country, identification with it, and special concern for its well-being and that of compatriots".

**

*An interesting examination of conservative and liberal definitions of patriotism can be found at Time Magazine*

Words

Words hold creative power. Genesis tells us the world was created through words.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 

Genesis goes on to say everything else was created through words, too. Creation was spoken into being. Except for humans - after a conversation within God's self,  humans were fashioned, from the earth, and given divine breath.

It occurs to me that breath is used for many things, one of which is to speak. Later, Jesus again reminds us the power our words have. While we may have forgotten the treasure we carry in our lungs, the power is still there, latent.


...if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.

 Lately, I've had the opportunity to witness the incredible power of words. A friend recently spoke words of truth and love into a dark place in my life, and indeed, I could suddenly see something new and clear, as if by magic.

Let there be light.

Another scene emerges. One person speaks bitterness and criticism into a room full of people dreaming something new, and working towards a common goal. The whole room deflates like a balloon, and everyone stops. What's the point?  The mountain of work seems to disappear, the beautiful vision is obscured.

You will say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there.'

Nothing will be impossible for us, Jesus warns. May we guard our tongues, for we speak with the breath of our creator.

LA Kills Its Artists

Creativity works best when the artist is relaxed, when the logical brain doesn't sit in the background keeping a close eye on everything, making sure that it shoots a warning flare at anything new and unrecognizable, even if it's just a fancy idea. I like to call this logical brain Babysitter Brain.

In other words, stress is bad for creativity. It forces your creative brain into a constant battle with Babysitter Brain, and trust me. Babysitter Brain usually wins. BABYSITTER BRAIN ALWAYS WINS DAMMIT.

In even more other words, Los Angeles might be the worst place to be if I expect to be an artist of any kind. Because basically, living in this city is like living in a veritable pinball machine of potential hazards - both in a physical visceral sense, and an emotional sense.

Right?

I recently read an essay written by an author who is truly astounded that Los Angeles is not the mecca of nature writing because it's bursting with the fecundity of nature and life and the interplay between the non-human world and human-built society. I thought hard about this. At first I was like, "Yeah! This author totally hit the nail on the head! Los Angeles is awesome and full of nature and beautiful and there is an ocean here and NATURE WRITERS FOREVAAAAA!" But then I drove like 60 miles in traffic in the next 12 hours and almost got in 4 accidents and 5-6 people rudely honked at me, and I had to beat an angry neighbor back with a stick, and literally step over 3-4 (it's hard to tell sometimes how many are down there) homeless drunk/high/exhausted people passed out on the street, after which I wrote large checks to people clamoring for too much money, and then I was like... "Oh." Yeah. That's why people don't move to LA to write about nature. It's not because LA doesn't have nature or tons of interesting cutting edge environmental movements budding and transforming society as we know it. It's because Los Angeles likes to KILL ITS ARTISTS. Through stress. It's amazing to me that movies get made  here, and it really makes me wonder about these successfully creative people. They must already be super rich (and able to buy themselves out of stress, duh), due to that successful screenplay they wrote whilst living a quiet Midwestern town where there is lots of corn growing just outside.

And then I put my hand on my chin and was like, "Ohhhh."

Disclaimer: This post *might* be a little bit of a rant due to some stressful events experienced by the artist in recent weeks and does not necessarily express the opinions of the blog managers.

Birthday Suit

I celebrated my thirtieth birthday. I spent several hours with a bunch of women at a Korean spa in Los Angeles. The place is an unassuming building in Koreatown, adjacent to a driveway full of potholes, and valet runners, and homeless men wandering the streets. It’s like many other places in Los Angeles.

Once inside, women of all colors, sizes, and ages mingle in various saunas, hot tubs, cold tubs, and open showers. Some socialize, some are silent. The older (and much wiser) Korean women sit together near a long trough full of warm water, and scrub each other’s backs. They talk without looking at each other, and rub at the same spot on their legs and arms and bellies for forty-five minutes at a time. I wonder if they all know each other or if they just make conversation because they are all here and naked next to each other, and there is not much else to do.

There is protocol. Always shower. After entering a spa, the body sweats, so you have to shower before doing anything else. It keeps the place, and each other, clean and sanitary. When you sit on something, you use a small towel as a barrier. There are women in the corners who call out numbers all day. When your number is called, you get a scrub from head to toe (yes, head to toe and everything in between). I can’t remember ever being this clean – certainly I was not after birth. The whole place reminds me of a tropical river, a constantly flowing stream of warm and cold water, steam and earth smells, and creatures everywhere. The murmur of female voices at first gets lost in the shock of being naked. After settling in, my ears become tuned to all the voices. The voices are all different, like the bodies they inhabit, like the animals along a riverbank. Some are high-pitched and raise at the end of sentences, signaling some mention of playfulness. Some are lower and firmer and stick to the tile and water. Some are hidden voices, requiring many heads to pull in tight, while others sing to the corners of the room without effort. All the sounds, taken together, are like my imagining of a woman’s womb, the place where we are all created and perhaps recreated, where somehow there is enough space to contain the world and especially our own selves.

We all look at each other. We look in curiosity, in fascination, and with no nonsense. We look at each others bodies to see ourselves, perhaps. It is the way a child looks at a grown man and understands that he will one day be just like him, or the way an elder looks at a teenager and remembers when she had crushes on boys. It happens in a moment of humble acceptance – a physical understanding that life is a continuum. In that moment, it's clear that our bodies are stories unfolding, and the imperfections are beautiful. The imperfections are marks of life itself.

It takes me days to process this experience, not because I have to (indeed, it is such a humble and quiet thing that it passes into memory easily and without fanfare), but because it struck something true, and that is worth pursuing. Many have said that we women are uncomfortable with our bodies because society has so sexualized us, and has made us objects. Some say we barely stand to look at ourselves in the mirror because we believe we are not sexy enough, not beautiful enough, not desirable enough. In fact, I don’t think that’s the case, by and large. I don’t believe that every woman wants to be supermodel-beautiful, or wants men to imagine being in bed with her at every glance. Instead, consider this. Do we women believe our bodies are the most fundamental representation of how ‘in control’ we are of ourselves and our lives? We fight to be perfect, to control our calories, to only eat organic, gluten-free, sugar-free, whole-grain, non-gmo foods. We try to starve ourselves to fit an ideal, or we rebel by eating everything we want. When it’s too hard, we give up, then we punish ourselves because we lost control. As our world becomes increasingly chaotic, do we see our bodies as a last bastion of power? If we can shape the details of our bodies, minimize our love handles, and perfectly predict the size of our breasts (and make sure others notice), perhaps we can prove that we are worthy of the goodness in our lives.

Since I’m thirty now, and since I have been naked with women in the spa womb, I can say with confidence that all of that is crazy talk. Controlling every detail of ones body doesn’t mean you have control of your life, and controlling everything doesn’t make anyone worthy of anything except maybe ‘controller of the year’ award. In fact, acceptance – of oneself and others – gets more mileage when it comes to being happy and productive. The fascination of all the flaws in ourselves and others might allow us to see beauty, and give us vision to see what’s important. In the spa the important thing is getting clean. Out here in the world, maybe it is letting go of the distractions, so we are free to take hold of what makes life worth living.

A friend of mine sent me a message wishing me a ‘transformational’ birthday. One thing I can say is this: It was certainly a rite of passage into a new era of embracing the whole story of life,  as time moves gloriously forward.