Since George Floyd’s murder in 2020, many Americans are looking at our history with new humility. Our teachers, it turns out, brushed past a lot of the racism and brutality that is woven into our national story from the start.
For the younger generation, this reassessment fits their world view. Baby Boomers still believe overwhelmingly that America is the best country on Earth, but a majority of those below age 40 do not.
To celebrate this New Year, I propose a truce, one that begins by throwing out that question. America doesn’t have to be the best country on earth for us to love it. It doesn’t have to be free of historic sins to be capable of great acts.
Consider, for starters, the epic scale of our help for Ukraine. The last time we pushed back on Moscow’s aggression came after its invasion of Afghanistan, when our aid to the resistance fighters peaked at $630 million in 1987.
Since the invasion in February, Congress has agreed to send $100 billion in aid over two years. And President Biden has rallied allies to roughly match our pace. Ukraine now has a shot at freedom that would be unimaginable without our help.
“I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart,” President Volodymyr Zelensky told Congress. “May God, forever, bless the United States of America.”
Love doesn’t have to be blind. And neither does patriotism.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the co-chairman of the January 6 committee, gets that. He represents the Mississippi Delta, the fertile valley where Native Americans were killed and expelled to make room for slave labor camps in the 1800s (which our teachers euphemistically called plantations.) The state was later stained by more lynchings than any other. Thompson was 15 years old when Medgar Evers was shot in the back by white supremacists.
So, Thompson knows all about America’s sins. But there he was releasing the committee’s report on Dec. 22 with a love song for our country.
“We can never surrender to democracy’s enemies,” he said. “We can never allow America to be defined by forces of division and hatred. We can never go backward in the progress we have made through the sacrifice and dedication of true patriots. We can never and will never relent in our pursuit of a more perfect union with liberty and justice for all Americans.”
Conservatives who see our history as a triumph of goodness are matched by progressives who see nothing but pain and hardship. Thompson sees both.
Another example: I have the good fortune to live in Jersey City these days, where thousands of us wake each morning to see the Statue of Liberty, a symbol, we learned as kids, of America’s sacred place as a last refuge for the world’s poor and persecuted.
But today, along the Mexican border, elected leaders like Gov. Greg Abbott in Texas are ginning up hatred and resentment against the huddled masses, even using them as pawns by sending busloads to northern states without warning, often without the simple decency to explain where they are headed and why.
So, through one lens, you can look at the Statue as a monument to our hypocrisy, a 19th century boast about virtues that have long since been abandoned. Our immigration laws today favor the rich over the tired, the poor, and the wretched that Emma Lazarus described. (Foreigners can get a Green Card and path to citizenship if they invest $800,000 here and create at least 10 jobs.)
But the Statue, like the Declaration of Independence, is aspirational. Bennie Thompson didn’t claim that we are living in a promised land, only that we are trying to get there. And as it happens, 14 percent of America’s population today was born abroad, nearly matching our peak at the turn of the 20th century. And still, 58 percent want to keep immigration levels the same, or increase them.
Visit Queens, or Jersey City, and count the number of languages you hear. Lady Liberty is cleaning Greg Abbott’s clock.
So, are we the best country in the world? An objective observer might note that Finland is the happiest country, and that in Denmark, child poverty is something they read about in books. If you start considering food and music and family cohesion, more contenders crowd the list.
But for me, patriotism is deeper than boosterism. I grew up as one of nine kids, a great blessing. But I don’t love my siblings because they are the best people in the world; in fact, half of them can be nuts half the time. I love them despite that.
Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights leader, has built a remarkable museum in Montgomery that chronicles the Black experience in America in horrifying detail. A nearby memorial park marks the more than 4,400 known lynchings, with the names of each victim etched into 800 steel columns, one for each county where these racial murders can be documented.
The surprise, to me, is that a day at the museum and memorial didn’t diminish my feelings of patriotism -- quite the opposite. The story is packed with heroes who pushed back, at grave peril, working to shape a better country.
This is where I part company from the conservatives who see an honest look at our history as threatening, who insist that we should teach our children through a gauzy filter.
Stevenson says they have it backwards: If you love the country, you need to face the truth.
“In the faith tradition I grew up in, you can’t come into the church and say, ‘Oh, I want salvation and redemption and all the good stuff, but I don’t want to admit to anything bad. I don’t want to have to talk about anything bad that I’ve done.’,” he said on Krista Tippett’s podcast On Being. “The preachers will tell you it doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to first confess and repent…What it does is open up the possibility of redemption and salvation.”
Yes, America can break your heart every day. We all know it could be so much better. But when my day comes, this is where my bones will rest, and I’d have it no other way.
More: Tom Moran columns
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com. Follow him on Twitter @tomamoran. Find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.
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