Pledging Allegiance, In Particular
The hopeful invitation that arrives amid every American political dumpster fire
You’ve seen the memes -perhaps- about the Supreme Court.
Maybe you even saw the president of The Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, talking about the second American Revolution he believes we are in.
Kevin, with his PhD and his very clear message, wanted people to know that this revolution would be bloodless if the Left lets it.
I laughed at how Politico summed up that statement. It was “A vague threat of violence”.
I guess it is vague in that Kevin does not say which person will violently accost who and with what.
He does something clever in his interview, where he points the finger at this group called “the left” and says it is THEY who have a history of violence. It undoes, in a way, the threat hanging in the air.
Kevin gets to say that if people don’t let him and his people push Project 2025 (to be covered further here and on Tik Tok) there will be blood.
But then he insinuates it will be others who do the bloodletting.
Ah. See how he keeps his hands clean there?
So the right-leaning groups who agree with and support this political and social vision for America who have already laid out what violence they will use and whose rights they will take away to regain dominance in society magically do not have a history of violence in Kevin’s eyes?
So saying then, if anyone stands in our way expect blood isn’t a threat?
Limiting violence to one magical group of people and knowing full well that “taking the country back” means reversing the democratically agreed protections for other people is wild, but predictable. If you can’t win by democracy, if you can’t win by good ideas, and if you can’t get people to agree to be oppressed steamroll through gerrymandering, voter suppression, and dismantling the federal government!
Oh, Kevin.
But wait, there is more, but I promise it gets better further down in this dispatch. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently granted a kind of immunity and legal cover to presidents that give them the power to excuse tyrants like King George’s behavior.
We celebrated the Fourth of July yesterday. I am annually shocked by how when surrounded by little babies and young families and old people stiff in their chairs and brightly colored fireworks on the beach I still tear up.
I like us. I like living here. We could be bowing to kings! We could be answering to Kevin and his narrow, tiny vision of America! I don’t want to see blood or be threatened or watch 31 men in box-cut khaki pants from Costco step out of a rental truck to rough up Liberals. Do I want to go to New Zealand and take care of sheep and let Kevin and Friends have their little hell of a country? Maybe. But how could I leave? I think as the fireworks shoot up into the air and I think about the sheer amount of imperial violence globally that has created the peaceful moment on the beach for me. How could I stay? I think, wondering what will happen if presidents can do whatever they want and we fall down some authoritarian rabbit hole. But what about all the people before me who stood facing the wind, getting kicked in the teeth by their own country, for the promise of today?
Stay with me, Ira Glass says when he holds our hand through a radio episode of This American Life. Ira knows he can get us to see the whole story and the disappointment and the hope in the context of a wider theme. Ira knows it’s hard to sometimes get the point in the abstract, so he and his team go way low to the ground and get up close to one person in one place. Ira’s show is one story at a time, about our neighbors, and how we’re connected in terrible and wonderful ways. About how maybe in human issues, the answer isn’t giving up on each other but coming closer. This American Life, he seems to say, can tell us something about our shared humanity. This American Life is always connected to That American Life.
It’s what Wendell Berry does with his poetry. Is America on fire? Consider the panting deer by the water. Take in the gentle breaths of a newborn baby. Remember why you’re angry in the first place. Remember what is at stake to protect and to love.
It is hard to pledge allegiance to a political system that has historically and continually let us down. You have to perhaps start pledging allegiance to the things the system is supposed to protect.
You might have to start pledging allegiance to the things you want the system to protect, so you even have the energy to make the system better. That long term, is more effective than thinking that hijacking the system for as long as you can is the solution.
It is hard to get hype for a system like the one Kevin wants to go back to, or for the people Kevin is talking to, or for a presidential power that can shoot people in the street and go back to work.
If you only love a country and the people in it when the system is working for you, you will get all mean and ugly when it doesn’t. You will be happy to throw away democracy, like Kevin and Friends. You will resort to power grabs and oppression. You will miss out on what the Black and Brown people and the women and the Native communities knew and drew on. Which was a deep-rooted sense and conviction of their humanity and other people’s. And that commitment, to each other’s flourishing and space, was not going to be broken up or taken away by any tyrannical power. This is helpful, because no matter what horrible truth or conflicting hypocrisy you dig up about this place, you don’t get stymied by disappointment. That kind of cynicism is a luxury. We have Redwoods and children to take care of. We don’t have time to sulk.
There was a period, after I left my faith for a good stint in a small wilderness, that I could not listen to the songs I grew up with. I couldn’t hear what they were saying anymore, because they represented a kingdom of dirt to me and lesser gods with false mustaches taped on. The anger at being sent into the culture war for a vision of the world I would reject when my prefrontal cortex developed was strong. My irritation at the way these beliefs and prejudices would haunt me long after I left.
The hypocrisy and betrayal of a creed imparted from a particular brand of evangelical American culture was all I could hear when the songs played. The space between the words and the actions was too great for my need for certainty that I called faith.
In the time since I found new songs. God was still speaking, if I could shut up long enough to listen.
And then Jon Bellion released a cover of Switchfoot’s Meant To Live.
I trusted Jon, his honesty, and how small the space was between his words and art. I also at this point, had pulled enough planks out of my eye by this point to rebuild the Church, so I was more open to listening to my people. The space between my words and actions is also vast and disappointing.
These are the lyrics I could finally here again.
//Fumbling his confidence and wondering
Why the world has passed him by
Hoping that he's bent for more than arguments
And failed attempts to fly, mhm
And we were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside, somewhere we live inside
We were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside
Dreamin' about Providence and whether mice
And men have second tries
Maybe we've been livin' with our eyes half open
Maybe we're bent and broken, ooh
We were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside, somewhere we live inside
We were meant to live for so much more, have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside, ooh
We want more than this world's got to offer
We want more than this world's got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
And everything inside screams for second life//
There is a vast distance between what America as a concept promises and what it delivers.
But every time the gap has closed in history, it is because people locked eyes with each other and chose to remember they mattered in a world that said they did not.
These courts and this country did not give freedom over easily. It was taken by communities who organized, protested, voted, and held hands against fire hoses and dogs.
Did violence build this country? Yes. Will violence keep it? No. We want more than the wars of our fathers.
Violence built an efficient racial and social caste system. To move away from the way that haunts us will require commitments to other things. Like your neighbor who you do not understand but who you do not seek to strip rights from. Like the babies at the park watching the baby ducks. Like the ducks themselves, who should be considered when making environmental laws.
And heck, I want for Kevin what Kevin doesn’t even want for me. I suspect my teeth-gritting love for his full freedom and my own is more powerful than his vision of America. I suspect this because I see the way that kind of allegiance wears down even the most evil of institutions like slavery ( I know we haven’t arrived but still).
It is going to be a rough presidential election year. It is going to be difficult to navigate a place where people are calling for civil war and hoping for blood and waiting to take away the rights of people who don’t look like them. It’s going to be hard, no matter what party takes office. One involves bracing for impact and the other involves managing people hell-bent on a return to the good old days when you could harass and control the people you hated.
That part of you inside that screams for a second life is not a problem, but a path. It is how you hold on to what is still good, true, and holy. It is how you get focused on the particular, how your love for it becomes a renewable kind of energy that doesn’t eat you up inside like bitterness and hate, and it is how your allegiance can remain uncorrupted.
Right now it’s Project 2025 and a Supreme Court decision. But we’ve seen this film before, and as Blondie says, we didn’t like the ending. There will be other projects and other decisions and other men with short buzzed haircuts spewing lies about people they can’t stand on television.
To be internally unswayed by the fear-mongering, to inoculate yourself from hopelessness, and to find daily something worth loving, is also part of our American legacy. To me, that’s worth celebrating, sitting on a beach surrounded by sandy, shrieking neighbors, staring up at the night sky, watching the light pierce the darkness.
Happy (Belated) Independence Day friends.