A More Perfect Union
“I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
I have been considering what it means to be proud of my country today, especially as so many people I trust and admire have become jaded. Pride too often seems like something inherited; something the color of the Star-Spangled Banner and fireworks. The more I think about it, the more I feel that kind of pride was never really mine to claim, and never really the point.
I know who I am. I am an upper-class white man. I have not been turned away, hunted, silenced, or told that the promises in our founding documents were written for someone else. The oppression, violence, and daily indignities that so many Americans have borne, I have only read about, heard about, or witnessed; I have never been a victim.
Whatever I feel about this country, I feel it from a place of safety that was never guaranteed to the laborers whose work built this country.
That is where my pride comes from. Not from the country as it was handed to me, but from the people who were handed far less and gave far more.
The First Nations of this continent have fought for this land and their place in it for centuries, and still hold it as something sacred rather than something owed. People of color spent generations forcing this country to mean its declarations of all persons being created equal, a sentence that wasn’t true on the day it was ratified but became truer only because people fought and bled to make it so. But, still, it is not yet true.
Women of every color have fought that same fight. Women marched, were jailed, and force-fed to win their right to vote. Women fought to own property, sign their own loans, and keep their own wages; women fight to be admitted to the schools, the jobs, and the golf courses where the country’s decisions get made. When Sally Ride became the first American woman in space in 1983, reporters asked how it would affect her body; she answered that it was “too bad that society isn’t further along and this is still such a big deal.”
Women are fighting, right now, for the most basic ownership of their own bodies.
None of it was given. All of it was won, inch by inch, from a country that had to be forced to share what it had promised everyone.
Queer Americans are still insisting, too, that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness include them. Harvey Milk, before he was assassinated for the work, said the whole point was to give people hope, because if one of us makes it, the doors open for everyone.
Frederick Douglass said it plainly in 1857:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.”
So many of my brothers and sisters have loved a country that did not love them back. They loved what it should be, and made it truer by sheer refusal to quit.
To be engaged in the fight is a harder, better thing than inheritance. That is something they chose, and that we still choose.
My grandfather was seventeen when he left school and volunteered to enlist in World War II. He was too young to serve, and he served anyway. He fought as a tail gunner in a B-24 with the Eighth Air Force in the European theater, offering up his body and future to fight the fascism, racism, and industrialized sadistic hate of the Nazis and the regimes that fought alongside them.
My grandfather, Harrell Lee Gardner, was given the privilege of coming home. He bore injury from it for the rest of his life. If my grandfather, as a teenager, could risk his body and life to defend what is right, the least I can do is spend the privilege and voice I was given for the same fight.
John R. Lewis knew that better than most of us. At twenty-five years old, on “Bloody Sunday,” in 1965, he was beaten nearly to death by racists, his skull fractured, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He still spent the rest of his life in the fight. John Lewis was elected to the United States House of Representatives twenty-one years later in 1986. Thirty-four years after that, in March 2020, standing on that very same bridge, Congressman Lewis charged all of us:
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
After Obama's swearing-in as president in 2009, Lewis asked him to sign a commemorative photograph of the event. The President wrote, "Because of you, John."
Congressman Lewis passed away in 2020.
Troy University renamed its oldest building for Lewis, taking the name of a former Ku Klux Klan officer off of it. In Georgia, a Confederate monument was replaced with a sculpture of Lewis. That is the country being forced truer, inch by inch, exactly as he spent his life demanding. Still, today, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act has not been made law.
When I consider the cruelty and greed that too often pass for leadership today, I don't feel my pride drain away. I feel it coalesce, I feel it harden, into something I can stand on.
A more perfect union was never a thing we finished. “A more perfect union” is a verb. “A more perfect union” is the work.
This July, to celebrate the United States Semiquincentennial, I'm flying two flags on my home in Hartsville, South Carolina. One is the Stars and Stripes. The other reads “Don't Give Up the Ship,” the words a dying captain gave his crew in 1813. That flag comes from the War of 1812, not the Revolution, and I fly it because the sentiment of that battle cry did not begin or end with the Declaration. It was already being bellowed before, it was still being fought for in 1813, and it is being fought for right now.
Liberty is not a thing we won once. It is a thing every generation has had to defend again. And again. And again. Those sailors fought like hell to keep their ship afloat, not because it was already saved, but because it was theirs and worth saving. It was, and is, our ship.
That is how I've come to feel about this country. It is my ship. It is our ship.
Our ship is taking on water right now.
If the hardworking builders of this country who were given so much less than I refused to give it up, then I am not going to give it up either. I'm going to bail and patch and pull on the lines alongside everyone else still fighting to keep our ship afloat even as it takes on water.
That is what I am proud of. That is my country. Our country is worth fighting for.
Our country is worth celebrating.
“Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
Sources
Baldwin: Notes of a Native Son (1955).
Ride: quoted in The Washington Post, July 24, 2012 (remarks made at the time of her 1983 flight).
Douglass: “West India Emancipation” address, Canandaigua, NY, August 3, 1857.
Lewis: spoken at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma, AL, March 1, 2020.
Baldwin: “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962.