Can We stir the patriotic heart?

There’s a point made by Shelby Steele in his 1990 book, The Content of Our Character, which has nagged at me for thirty-five years: that our leftwing political passions are motivated, in part, by our desire to claim innocence, to view ourselves as virtuous non-perpetrators of injustice.

Steele puts it this way in a conversation with his filmmaker son and a journalist:

“In a society like America, with our history, we have this combination of unparalleled greatness and almost unbelievable evil. The pressures of being an American involve grappling with innocence. . . We have wealth, but we don’t have the legitimacy innocence gives us. It’s politics— ‘my politics have more innocence than yours.’”

We can gain this power of moral cleansing, moreover, he says, simply by vehemently protesting what is, without taxing ourselves to come up with plausible versions of what might be.

I’ve certainly been guilty of this, of yelling NO without thinking hard about YES —but more often I’ve been less-than-passionate in my protesting because I think too muchabout the complexities. I hear the daily new about Israel’s slaughtering and starving of Palestinians, and I think, Omigod what the fuck Netanyahu is such a fascist! Next I hear a representative of the Israeli government talking about Hamas’s many atrocities, including commandeering food supplies in the starving ruins of Gaza, and I think, Yikes, that’s one ruthless enemy to face.

After a few more moments of internal back-and-forth, I realize, once again, that my political stances are very much shaped by whose “facts” I choose to believe and whose humanity I hold more dear. Then, with Shelby Steele’s observation in mind, I have to play referee and ask myself: What would I do? What do my beliefs, my sense of both morality and practicality, dictate doing?

The storm of uncertainty that follows — my ideas are unrealistic; human beings are beyond hope; kindness = surrender; the people in power have no operative consciences; I have no power to influence anything — usually leaves me clinging desperately to one touchstone belief of mine, namely, that working to inject compassion and humanistic optimism into our dealings with one another is the only way we have to escape the traps of hatred, domination, and dehumanization. Remember, gang, we’re all human beings, each suffering and each celebrating in our own way.

Going through this ping-pong process has sometimes yielded creative ruminations about “how it could be different,” of what lies beyond protest. Such writings and artworks might be classified under the general heading, “Imagine” (thank you, John Lennon), or “What Love Looks Like.”

My first real piece of this kind came in the late 1990s as a realistic-looking fake front page of the New York Times dated January 1, 2000. It was filled with headlines about a world redeemed: LAST KNOWN NUCLEAR WEAPON DISMANTLED BY UN; AFRICA’S BUMPER HARVEST, BOTH FOOD AND CHILDREN; etc. My plan was for the project to serve as a fundraiser for various causes, and I actually secured commitments from Noam Chomsky, Arthur Waskow, Letty Pogrebin, and a few other rainmakers to write articles in their fields of expertise. Despite this, I couldn't find a publisher, and that was that.

Some twenty years later, for a Jewish Currents calendar, I created a series of front pages of the “Besere Velt Times” (the Better World Times") and wrote the articles myself.

This kind of conjuring has brought forth no results, of course, beyond a few chuckles and sighs — and now we have Donald J. Trump, and nearly everyone I know is again protesting passionately while feeling helpless, meanwhile looking to the Democratic Party and its allies at Harvard and NPR to create our besere velt.

Is that the best we can do, to act as if the Democratic Party’s world-policing, status-quo policies didn’t help induct the Bogeyman into the White House?

Is there a way, instead, to pursue something more basic, more optimistic, more visionary? To renew an FDR-ish, “Four Freedoms” liberal sensibility? An MLK-ish, patriotic anti-racism? A You-Know-Who-ish, “suffer the children” pro-immigration feeling? A bread-and-roses feminism that reaches out to everyone?

I’m too old to be slap-happy about the idea of creating new messaging, not when our country is barely literate, social media has us all cocooned, the MAGA world has been taught to thoroughly despise and dehumanize the “libtards,” and the worst elements of humanity are now solidly in power and pulling the U.S. to the edge of the cliff.

(Sometimes I even find myself thinking, Jump, jump!)

Nevertheless, I was very, very inspired by the patriotism displayed on many of the protest signs I saw on NO KINGS! day, so I think I’m going to go back to work at creating images about progressive patriotism. Something to do in my old age.

I might begin with messaging about how much science, medicine, technology, and humanistic enlightenment has improved the standing of the human race. I’m currently reading Steven Pinker’s 2018 book, Enlightenment Now, and I’m finding it joyful and provocative to contemplate some of the statistics he cites, such as:

• Extreme poverty has declined from more than 60 percent of the world population when I was born in 1951 to about ten percent today. The whole world is steadily becoming middle-class.

(While Trump and the Republicans destroy free trade . . .)

• Child mortality throughout the world is down from 18 percent during my childhood to 4 percent today, while childbirth maternal deaths have dropped almost in half since the 1980s.

(Meanwhile Trump and the Republicans wipe out USAID. . .)

• For all of our consumption needs, habits and desires, we use less and less material to live our lives, thanks to the marvels of modern technology.

(While Trump and the Republicans defund scientific research capable of saving the environment. . .)

• Land set aside for biodiversity (parks and reserves) increased from 8.2 percent of the Earth in 1990 to 14.8 percent in 2014, and protected marine areas have doubled in the same period to 12 percent of the world’s oceans.

(While Trump and the Republicans seek to sell off government-owned land and open Alaska to more mining and oil drilling . . .)

Let’s leave it to Donald Trump to lie about how horrible everything is. Our messaging should celebrate progress — we’re progressives, no?