Americans

 This holiday weekend I moved around to multiple locations, including a spell at San Jose's minor league baseball park to watch an open-air movie and fireworks, where country songs made up the soundtrack.

One was Lee Greenwood's "Proud To Be An American."

It occurred to me that I'm an odd mix of an openly patriotic person who can dig a jingoistic song like that, but still be fiercely opposed to white nationalist BS like what drove those who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6th, 2021. 

I'm sure many of the insurrectionists like that song too but we are polar opposites in other respects. So how can I explain this?

Well maybe I can't. Growing up in small cities in Michigan in the 50s and 60s, I did not identify with the coasts or with big-city life at all. My parents were naturalized citizens and we were not rich.

My taste in music was my always own -- my Dad hated country songs and didn't care for rock 'n roll either.. But it was the story-telling in one and the beat in the other that hooked me, along with the schmaltzy emotionality of one and the rebelliousness in both. 

I was a sickly kid and for a crucial period I had few friends. For whatever set of reasons, I always identified with underdogs and outsiders. At the University of Michigan, thanks to a scholarship awarded by Republican Gov. George Romney's administration, I was first exposed to the burgeoning antiwar and civil rights movements.

I quickly morphed into a student activist, then a journalist. I discovered I was ambitious and because of my political activism, which included an arrest, I couldn’t find a job in journalism in Michigan. So I headed west.

Moving to San Francisco in my 20s and developing connections in New York, L.A. and Washington completed my transformation into a midwesterner-in-exile.

By now you really can’t distinguished me from any other Bay Area progressive on the outside, but on the inside I’ve never lost my small-town Michigan roots. I miss it.

Fast forward to present tense, with a  nation and a culture so divided it hurts, people like me actually carry around divided hearts. When it comes to specific political issues I almost always come down on the side of progressives. When it comes to the places I prefer to hang out, it's big cities like the aforementioned.

Meanwhile, I hate the right-wing extremists and conspiracy theorists who have developed such a hold on some of the people whose lives I left behind when I moved away from the Midwest. 

Still, many of those back home are good people, patriotic Americans. They've been sold a bad line of goods involving a false sense of resentment, and a demagogue named Trump came along to take advantage of them. They also have had trouble letting go of their biases against the coasts and big-city life. 

They need to get over that. Otherwise, our democracy is at serious risk going forward.

I hold out hope that enough of them will come to their senses and back into the great middle of our culture, reject extremism and embrace the true meaning of patriotism.That once again reason will prevail. Then maybe we can all sing Lee Greenwood's song in the same tune.

***

When it comes to patriotism and democracy I strongly recommend these three articles listed below from The New Yorker from mid-2021.

* Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol

* What We Get Wrong About America’s Crisis of Democracy 

* This July 4th, Can We De-Adapt from the Pandemic and Trump at the Same Time? 

(Three years after I first posted this (on Facebook) it seems more relevant than ever.)