Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Prodigal nation

I’m starting this on Juneteenth — it has taken too long to include this date in the roster of our national holidays, but it’s there now and has been for the past five years, thank goodness.

It chokes me up when this precious, prodigal nation of ours manages to do something right in the midst of this chaos we’re living in. America chokes me up, period. It turns out, for the last couple of decades, I’ve been increasingly moved and shaken by whatever this feeling is.

I’ve felt an inchoate version of it ever since I turned nine, and Mr. Smith went to Washington. It went underground, I guess, in my busy, distracted 30s and 40s but, in the past two decades, it’s come roaring back. I would call it “patriotism” if that word didn’t sound so brass-buttoned and square-jawed. 

My country — the United States of America — was and is for many, still a brand name, like Xerox, like Google, like when you need a tissue, but you ask for a Kleenex. America’s like that, synonymous with “democracy”— with a whole cadre of symbols and surrogates: 

The Stars and Stripes, Uncle Sam, Lady Liberty, apple pie, the bald eagle, that “say” so. But this inconvenient feeling that has persisted for years now, is deeper than an annual swell of pride, beyond the pledges, and past the “dawn’s early light.” Along with tears of joy it often brings those of sadness, frustration and even fear. I think it had something to do with my beginning to wake up, about 20 years ago, to how deeply asleep I’d been to the fact that the America I had lived in for 60 years, and thought I knew, was not the same country for a huge swath of my fellow citizens.

I’ve tried writing about it — in a spate of uniformly unpublished articles and barely-attended one woman shows that even I found preachy and strident. America was born rich — for all its struggles, it had been “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

That one impossible but transformative idea galvanized the founders, the colonists, and countless millions of human beings who have streamed to its shores for the past two hundred years.

Let’s face it, though, true democracy goes against the seemingly indelible grain of the human species which, so far, appears genetically hardwired to wage battle for supremacy, one group of humans against the other. How could any rational person ever believe that the ‘equality of humans’ would be seen by such a species as a desirable goal, let alone an achievable one.

And yet those flawed founding fathers, made equality and freedom the two halves of the beating heart of our infant nation — at least in theory. 

The trouble seems to be that nobody is quite sure about what equality is. In fact, some people get impatient when you ask them. They usually say something like, “Everybody can’t be equal — it’s impossible. It’s just an ideal.” But, in this unequal world, isn’t that why our Constitution and the Bill of Rights strove to guarantee equality in at least a few crucial areas? 

This infant country, so blessed at its beginning in spite of the gene of slavery it inherited, grew tall and strong, a light for the world, but now, turning 249 and in its adolescence, it’s foundering — and that’s not a political statement, it’s an existential one. Politics?

Democracy is the messiest form of government on the planet because it relies, in part, on politics — the “sturm und drang” of two or more factions, each convinced they know the best way to preserve and promote the rights and freedoms of its democracy. Oligarchies, monarchies, straight-up dictatorships have no need of politics.

But, maybe because it’s never really dealt with its legacy of inequality, our half-grown country has been making some poor choices for decades, and now, like most teens, insecure and arrogant at the same time, it’s particularly vulnerable. The choices it makes now could not only be self-destructive but lethal. And that persistent feeling I have? 

I realize it’s very similar to the deep love and terror I have felt when a beloved member of my family, young, talented and promising, was choosing potentially self-obliterating options. And my heart was always in my mouth.

I didn’t use “prodigal” in my title to be Biblical — though somehow, these seem to be Biblical times. I use it in the broadest sense — not just meaning “reckless and wasteful with monetary resources,” but unmoored from values that respect and preserve human, moral and spiritual equality and freedom. In other words, all those things that America, and its sacred democracy, are made of. 

Hopeful Birthday tomorrow, precious country, and many, many to grow on.