NEWFANE — If you were at the supermarket with your 6-year-old child, and you saw them take a candy bar off of the rack and start to eat it, would you simply shrug and pretend you didn't notice? Or would you stop them and explain why that is wrong? And would you love them any less for their mistake?
And if that same child started picking on the neighbor kids, making them cry by taking their toys and being physically aggressive, would you ignore it and claim that it is “just a phase” they are going through?
If, a few years later, the child steals a car for a joyride and survives the crash that ensues, would you rationalize it as simply an act of a freedom-loving kid, or would you try to improve your child's sense of morality and teach them to be aware of the ramifications of their actions? If the latter, would these remonstrations show that you hate your child for trying to discipline them?
If your grown child got drunk and had an accident, killing someone else, would you shrug and say, “It is what it is,” for fear that any other reaction would make your child think that you didn't love them?
The answers to these questions are obvious - you wouldn't ignore the aberrant behavior, you would try to correct it, and that work would be undertaken because you love your child and want them to do right in the world.
But if the entity in need of correction is your country, or a country allied to yours, and you do the hard work of trying to correct the mistakes and repair the harm caused, a choir of furious “patriots” will cry out that you hate your country, or if the criticism is about Israel, that you are anti-Semitic.
Apparently, rooting for the team is far more important to these people than noticing what the team does.
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“My country, right or wrong” is an abominable phrase, giving license to politicians to conduct illegal wars, abuse human rights, or promote racist policies without fear of being held accountable for actions that ultimately weaken and destroy the country.
But the knee-jerk reactions of Americans to any critique of the ruling class which threatens the sanctity of militarism, white supremacy, or unfettered capitalism and the greed that it engenders shows that “my country, right or wrong” is deeply rooted and not going away any time soon.
America isn't structured as an ad hoc, lawless mob. We have a Constitution that governs our political system and lays out the moral framework about how we see ourselves.
The fact that the founders built in a mechanism to legally change the Constitution shows that they understood that their contemporary ideas about nations and governance may require amending as times change and evolve.
When the evils of slavery became so obviously abhorrent that the conscience of the majority of Americans could no longer countenance it, we sacrificed hundreds of thousands of lives to end it. That sacrifice could only happen because Americans loved their country and understood that it was no longer living up to our beliefs as expressed in our founding documents.
The Constitution has been amended several times. We realized that denying Black Americans equal rights and recognition was an abomination and so we ended the legal framework that made that possible. We gave women the right to vote.
These amendments were driven by love, not hate. We loved our founding story and ideals and knew that hard work would be required to align the status quo and the nation's political structure more closely with those values.
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Today, we face the same challenge.
Unfettered capitalism, white supremacy, and militarism are still deeply entrenched in our collective psyche and have driven the country to the breaking point. We have made racist discrimination illegal, but it still thrives in the hearts of many.
The stranglehold that the 1 percent have on our political system has ensured that their wealth will continue to grow obscenely while more and more Americans succumb to the deprivations of poverty and despair.
We are supposed to be equal under the law. But if you are rich, like the Sackler family, you can poison and kill thousands, pay a fine, and be left alone with your fortune and your freedom intact.
Meanwhile, if you are a low-level dealer of those same drugs, and especially if you are a person of color, you will be imprisoned for years and forever after be treated as a second-class citizen.
The message isn't “we hate this country, and we hate you.” The message is that we have failed to live up to our ideals, and the moral and economic fabric of the nation is being shredded as a result.
We owe it to ourselves and our fellow citizens to stand up and speak out when the nation behaves badly. The message is: “We love this country, and it is time that the country loved everybody back.”
Too many people in this country don't get that love - in fact, they are beaten and bullied by a system that is not living up to its own principles.
If we won't accept the need for change, if we're not willing to face up to our failures, then we aren't only falling far short of our ideals, we are, in fact, nurturing the seedlings of our own destruction.
Shooting the messenger has never been good policy.