Anti-American

I got a note from a reader the other day asking me if I hadn’t become somewhat “anti-American” in some of my writings. It is a reasonable question to ask in these times. If we criticize the actions of the US government, does that make us anti-United States? Here are some thoughts on that.

I have never forgotten the words that a minister friend of mine spoke from his Methodist pulpit some years ago. “We need to not forget that we live in a nation founded on the enslavement of one race of people and the genocide of another.” Harsh words to be sure, but also factually accurate.

This is the USA, a nation in which our declarations about who we are have so often been at long odds with the realities of our actions. At its birth the nation’s founders declared us to be a land dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal,” while many of them were still busy selling human beings like commodities off a store shelf. Today our national hypocrisy is embedded in a war based on one lie after another, proving sadly that it takes us roughly three decades to forget that costly lesson.

To be clear however, I do love my home country. I love and miss the wildness of its character. I miss out-there gay people. I miss that glorious mix of immigrants from everywhere. I miss the wonder of little league games. I miss and love the beauty of the land, the glory of how sunrise looks over the San Francisco Bay. I cherish the folk music of the 1930s and those who keep it alive. I miss unabashed rock and roll and people who dance with their whole bodies and not just their hips. And especially, I respect and hold in high esteem those who fight for social justice in my home country, even when it has become so sadly out of fashion to do so.

But when it comes to what this nation, the USA, does in its actions abroad, the gap between our stated values and the actions we take could hardly be wider. From this vantage point of Bolivia we have reported on this many times.

We have reported the story of a Bolivian mother and her baby jailed for nearly two years in the name of helping the US look like it was winning a war on drugs. We have written about how a US corporation, Bechtel, took over Cochabamba’s water and priced it out of reach of the poor, in the name of beefing up profits for one of the wealthiest corporations on Earth. We have written about how a US-controlled institution, the IMF, knowingly coerced Bolivia into an economic squeeze that provoked a bloody public rebellion.

Just as it is a fact that the US “was founded on the enslavement of one race of people and the genocide of another”, so it is true that in many parts of the world, including this one, “American’ has become a synonym for arrogance. Unfortunately, that is not an attitude based on misinformation.

There is, of course, the view reflected on that old bumper strip, “America, Love it or Leave It.” We hear that same mentality expressed today. Here is another view. When we raise our children we do not measure our love by what we let them get away with. We measure it by the ways in which we support them and push them to reach a higher standard. Why should we measure love of country differently than that?

As I see it, the people who love “America” best are not those who see immorality in the commitment of two gays who love one another and see morality in warfare based on a lie. All that, to me, is what is resolutely “anti-American”. I believe that the people who love America most are those who seek to hold it to the standards which we set for ourselves at the start: truth, justice, liberty, freedom, equality.

The day that holding the US to these values becomes “anti-American” is the day when the dream of America will formally be buried.