A Patriot

Born in the USA

I am an American.  I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.  My mother was an immigrant, a “war bride” to be exact, traveling from post World War II England with my Cincinnati born father.   They lived the American dream, worked their way up in business together and had a successful career and a wonderful life.  Though Mom never gave up her British citizenship, she was as proud of her adopted country as the nation of her birth.  When she died she got her wish, a “piece of England” here in the United States. 

American Upbringing

I am an American.  I was a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout, and an Eagle Scout with the Bronze Palm and the Medal of Merit (if you know what all that means, you were a Boy Scout too!)  Scouting taught me how to tie knots and hitches, save someone’s life, swear, and be a leader. It developed my interest in helping kids (and a career in education) and a lifelong love of the outdoors.  

Scouting let me hike along the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina and Tennessee, the White Mountains in New Hampshire, the Alleghenies in Pennsylvania, the Maroon Bells in Colorado and the Sangre de Cristo of New Mexico.  It gave me an appreciation of the grand scope of America, seeing the vast plains from a train, and canoeing the boundary waters in the North.  I learned to love America the land, as well as America the country.

 In Junior High and High School, I ran track, swam, wrestled and had a very short stint in football.  I was in the school plays and the school academic contests. After college, I became a schoolteacher and a coach in a suburban high school for thirty-five and a half years.  Does it get more American than that?

 Don’t Give Up the Flag

So don’t tell me that because I am a Democrat, a Liberal, and someone filled with compassion for those that my country is persecuting, that somehow I am not an American, a patriot. I do not concede my country, my mountains and plains, and my flag to those who would try to remake America in an old, outdated, monochromatic image of a discredited past.  

It is American to protest, older than the nation itself.  Thomas Paine, Samuel Adams, and Patrick Henry rose to speak against the monarchy and empire before Jefferson put his pen to the Declaration of Independence. There is nothing more American than to disagree with the government.

I concede nothing. It’s my flag, whether it has thirteen stars in a circle, or fifty stars in lines.  Martin Luther King Jr. marched under the American Flag, as did the Union soldiers at Gettysburg.  An American Flag covered my father’s casket; I display it still in my home.  The Boy Scouts taught me to honor that flag, to raise it quick, lower it slow, and fold it with dignity.  But they also taught me that the flag is not the sole property of one political view.  Even as a boy, there were Scouts who went to Vietnam, and Scouts who protested that their brother Scouts had to go.  They all flew the flag.

Protest is Patriotism

Some burned the flag in an ultimate sign of protest.  While that’s not what I believe, their right to do so is as American as the flag itself. Some athletes today are called to protest by kneeling during the National Anthem.  They are Americans, exercising their time-honored right to protest. They are highly aware of the costs, from the NFL players to the eighth grader girls’ basketball team in the next school district.  

Let it be known:  they are Americans and they are Patriots.  They are calling on the exact words of the US Constitution, our founding document.  Our goal in America:  “…to become a more perfect union.”  America cannot be further “perfected” without calling out the inequalities in American life. It might make us uncomfortable, it might seem “inappropriate;” but when is difficult change ever going to be “appropriate?”  When is it ever easy to say something is wrong?

When four women of color, band together as Congressmen to point out the inequities in America, we don’t have to agree with their conclusions.  Disagreement is as American as Hamilton and Jefferson.  But we must recognize that they are in fact patriots, working to improve the experiment started 243 years ago by flawed men in Philadelphia.  Those men were protestors, they were agitators, they were community organizers, and they were going against the establishment.  They were patriots, and so is the “the squad.”  And so am I.