“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
— Emma Lazarus
I still recall how much I loved my country when I was a little kid, how vividly I imagined Paul Revere and his ride, and how I revered George Washington for never telling lies. Like most kids my age, I half believed that the Lone Ranger was real, and Tonto, too. And they were both Americans, and they were both thoroughly good.
I felt the pilgrim’s pride, and I loved the tale of how they had invited their native neighbors to celebrate the harvest with them.
I was told and I believed that nearly all the good things ever invented were created by Americans born or brought up in a place where people like Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, or Alexander Graham Bell sprung from the soil to make the world a better place. Hardly anyone from anywhere else had hardly ever invented anything of value.
When Dr. Jonas Salk came up with a vaccine to cure polio, he was a hero to kids who knew other kids stricken with that disease, boys whose limbs were withered and childhoods truncated by that sickness. He gave his lifesaving medicine away, and he was an American hero.
Our dads had almost all fought the Nazis, the Japanese, or the Italian fascists, keeping the world “safe for “democracy,” a word we didn’t fully understand but knew for sure it was a good thing lots of people in lots of other countries didn’t have. And only we could bring it to them.
The kids slightly older had been taught that the Soviet Union was our ally in the war against the bad guys, but almost as soon as the war ended, we were told they were the bad guys, and we were soon persuaded that was so.
We liked Ike. He’d won the war; he had a nice face, and his wife looked like a nice old lady, the kind that handed out home-made cookies to Halloween trick-or-treaters. Good cookies. American cookies.
When kindly and avuncular Walt Disney gave us Disneyland and amiable Fess Parker as Davy Crockett, most of us who lived far away from California wanted to go there, but doubted our dads could ever afford to take us.. We also nagged our parents to buy us coonskin caps by the millions to play out our fantasy that we could, in due time, be as ideally American as Davy was. We were going to remember the Alamo even if we hadn’t been born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.
But we weren’t going to be told about Manzanar, the Trail of Tears, or the massacre of black folks in Tulsa, Oklahoma just over a hundred years ago. Unless we took an interest in history, which we were unlikely to do because it had been designed to bore us, there was a ton of bad stuff we’d likely never know. As it was taught in elementary schools It was mostly all dates and names of landmark legislation we didn’t really understand or care about. And in high school it was often taught by P.E. Teachers or coaches who didn’t know much history themselves. Few historical figures came to life as actual human beings. They were cardboard action figures in those deadly dull textbooks we had to read and then be tested on. The results would be on our “permanent record.” A rock band of the 60s said we were “born to be wild,” but the fact was were taught to be afraid, very afraid.
But, as “influenced” as we’d been as children, lots of us came to adolescence with an awakening sense that something was not quite right. We’d been taught to dive under our desks in the event of an atomic bomb. We were persuaded to believe that people who needed assistance from the government were freeloaders, mostly black. We were told that a woman’s place was in the home even though most of us working class kids forgave our moms who often had jobs, and needed them.
None of the moms on the TV shows had jobs, however. They all wore dresses to do housework, and wore aprons when they cooked dinner so it was ready when dad came home bringing worldly wisdom for his flock of 3.4 children, the ideal size for Americans of that time. Unlike our parents, those grownups on TV slept in twin beds. We thought it was a class thing, as in high class versus no class.
We’d been told the policeman was our friend, but by then we had seen that wasn’t always so, or we’d seen movies where cops were sometimes corrupted, or mean as hell.
We were losing our innocence. Increasingly, we learned we’d been lied to about lots of things. We resented that we’d not been prepared for a world fraught with dangers, that we could be drafted and sent to fight and maybe die in countries we’d never even heard of. We’d been told to eat anything because everything was good for us, and that we were damn lucky to have it, unlike those starving children elsewhere in the world. That was intended to make us feel guilty when we failed to leave our plates clean We’d been instructed to believe the motives of advertisers, pastors, or leaders would always be good and noble. It was our duty not to question much of anything.
But what we’d heard about that “police action” our older brothers had fought in Korea seemed scary as hell, and though we wanted to be heroes as our dads and uncles had been, we didn’t really want to go based on what filtered down to us. Things didn’t always go our way, as we’d been told, and the good guys weren’t always good, nor did they always win.
But Khruschev, the boogeyman in charge in the Soviet Union had pounded on the table at the United Nations and had said that they would “bury us.” So we both did and yet didn’t quite want to die fighting the dreaded Communists, the villains who were so evil as to reject the American way of life.
What was a kid to think? We began to see how our dads were getting shafted. Go where you’re sent, fight, pick up your scars and a medal or two, maybe, come home, get a job, work hard for 50 weeks a year, take your family on 2-week vacation if you could afford to go anywhere, grow old, retire on a pension, get sick, and die.
And the next thing we knew, we were eligible for the draft ourselves. There was talk about the menace to us all in a place called Vietnam, and we began to be sucked into the maw to do our patriotic duty. Then President Kennedy was assassinated, the world turned darker, and in hardly any time at all American young people in tie-dyed duds were singing along with the Who in hopes we’d die before we got old. One of our favorite bands was called The Grateful Dead, though even the Deadheads misspelled it as Greatful.
Still, for love of country, lots of us got shuffled off to war. Lot of us who also loved our country burned draft cards, split for Canada, or marched in protests against the war that steadily increased in size as the horror of what was going on over there came to us on the news nightly, brought to us by guys we mostly all trusted, men like Walter Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley. Those Communists we’d been told were going to bomb us had turned up in Vietnam and if we didn’t fight ‘em over there , we would damn sure have to fight ‘em over here. And guys we went to high school with kept coming home in body bags.
Books were coming out telling us that the kindly old undertakers we’d known in our towns were, in fact, ripping us off. The people selling stuff to spray on our crops were endangering pelicans and lots of other creatures by putting DDT in insecticides and that unregulated stuff was killing up and down the food chain. We came to find out that American draftees had been marched into the Nevada desert to witness nuclear test explosions unprotected from radioactive sand that blew into their faces from the blasts. We learned, in short, that we weren’t always in good hands, that we hadn’t always been told the truth. Nor were we being told it then.
Those of us who opposed the war thought we were every bit as patriotic as those who fought it, Our distrust would grow. Many of us who went off to college learned that there was much to question in what we’d been taught. And when doubts began to surface, we saw that passive acceptance of all we were told about how things were was toxic and dangerously wrongheaded. Elvis had taught us how repressed we’d been, and we thought about all those guys who’d been sent to war right after high school and died without ever having gotten laid.
Then, in quick succession, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, JFK’s brother Bobby was shot, and Malcolm X was shot. Oh, and college students, too, at South Carolina State College, at Kent State, and elsewhere.
From Nixon onward, we questioned things, stayed active, stayed vigilant, and tried hard to stay informed. We protested for human rights, for the environment, and for our children’s futures in the spirit of patriotism, out of love for our country, and our planet. But after the war ended and the draft was abolished, too many of us stopped paying as much attention as we had when our own asses had been on the line.
And now we our coming up on the 250th anniversary of the year we declared freedom from tyranny, for some, but not all. We’ve arrived at this milestone with another mad “king” in charge, as our rights are being chipped away, as the wealth gap widens catastrophically, as money doesn’t just talk, it swears. At the top of its lungs.
Reagan had led directly to Trump, as had George W. Bush. The so-called American Dream became a nightmare. And we’ve been lost in that ever-darkening nightmare for a long time now, still not knowing if we’ll wake up in time to reclaim reasons why we ever loved this nation in the first place.
So, in this year of 2026, I don’t feel like celebrating what this country is now. I don’t want to hear Lee Greenwood sing that bullshit song with the words “at least I know I’m free” as he’s cheered by people who mostly aren’t. I don’t want to sing about bombs bursting in air over a fort during a war few Americans even know about. I don’t want to set off fireworks to scare the dogs. I don’t want to salute the flag that flies over the desecrated and defiled White House, don’t wish to place my hand over my still beating heart to pledge allegiance to a country that invades other countries at the whim of a megalomaniac who has hugged that flag so often and so obscenely. I don’t want to drink beer, eat hotdogs, and red, white, and blue cake in honor of a place that bombs children, kills men in small boats with millions of dollars in high technology and bombs built to take out ships. I’m shamed to have my taxes go to Netanyahu’s genocide efforts. I can’t feel pride in a country that allows itself to be turned over to men like a racist South African mega billionaire to do with as he pleases, a non-citizen elected by no one. Though America is in great need of blessings now, I cannot appeal to God in song to bless a nation where far too many people still are devoted to protecting pedophiles, where a monster like Stephen Miller has more clout than the entire legislative branch seems to have and where cruelty is the unofficial policy of the United States of America, land I once loved.
I would love to love my country as I did when I was a boy, but unless or until we can remove the Trump/Maga stain and make this a place a whole lot more worthy of pride, I’m going to take a pass on the celebration.
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