Loving
America and Resisting Trump
The New Patriotism
By Frida Berrigan
February
16, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
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"Tom
Dispatch"
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So reality
has inexorably, inescapably penetrated my life.
It didn’t take long. Yes, Donald Trump is
actually the president of the United States. In
that guise, in just his first weeks in office,
he’s already declared war on language, on
loving, on people who are different from him --
on the kind of world, in short, that I want to
live in. He’s promised to erect high walls, keep
some people in and others out and lock up those
he despises, while
threatening to torture and abuse with
impunity.
Still,
a small personal miracle emerges from this
nightmare. It turns out that, despite growing up
an anarchist protest kid who automatically read
Howard Zinn’s
A People’s History of the United States
alongside the official textbooks, I love this
country more each day. So I find myself
eternally upset about our new political
reality-show, about a man so thin-skinned he
lashes out at everything and so insulated in his
own alt-reality that no response to him seems to
matter.
Above
all, I am so mad. Yeah, I’m mad at all
those people who voted for Trump and even madder
at the ones who didn’t vote at all. I’m mad at
everyone who thinks the sum total of their
contribution to the political well-being of this
country is voting every two or four years. I’m
mad at our corporate-political system and how
easily distracted people are. I’m steaming mad,
but mostly at myself.
Yep,
I’m mad at myself and at the Obamas. They made
empire look so good! Their grace and
intelligence, their obvious love for one another
and the way they telegraphed a certain
approachability and reasonableness. So
attractive! They were fun -- or at least they
looked like that on social media. Michelle in
the
karaoke car with Missy Elliot singing
Beyoncé and talking about
global girls' education! Barack and a
tiny Superman at a White House Halloween
party. Michelle, unapologetically
fierce after Trump’s demeaning Access
Hollywood
comments came to light. I loved those
Obamas, despite my politics and my analysis. I
was supposed to resist all his efforts at world
domination through
drones and sweeping trade deals and instead
I fell a little bit in love, even as I marched
and fasted and tried to resist.
Falling in
Love With My Country
Now, we have a new president. And my love is
gone, along with my admiration, my pride, and my
secret wish to attend a state dinner and chat
with the Obamas over local wine and grass-fed
beef sliders.
What’s
not gone, though, what’s strangely stronger than
ever, is my love for this country.
I
didn’t love the United States under Jimmy Carter
or Ronald Reagan or Bush the First. I was a kid
and they were names on protest banners and
headlines in the news. My parents were the
Catholic peace activists Liz McAlister and Phil
Berrigan, and I grew up in an anarchist
collective of Christian resisters. My parents
and their friends went to jail repeatedly and
resolutely. We
demonstrated, rallied, and railed at every
institution of power in Washington. Those
presidents made the adults around me angry and
agitated, so they scared me.
I
didn’t love the United States under Bill Clinton
either -- I was young and in college and opposed
to everything -- nor under George W. Bush. I was
young and in New York City and still opposed to
almost everything.
I
started calling myself a “New Yorker” three
years after moving there when, on a sunny
Tuesday morning, airplanes became weapons, tall
towers fell, and 3,000 people died. I emerged
from my routine subway ride at 14th Street,
unaware and unscathed, to stand still with the
rest of the city and watch the sky turn black. I
spent the rest of that day in Manhattan with
friends trying to reach my parents and following
the news, as we all tried (and failed) to come
to grips with the new reality. Once the bridges
reopened, we walked home to Brooklyn that
evening, terrified and shell-shocked.
9/11
provided the rationale for sweeping changes in
Washington. War by fiat, paid for in emergency
supplementals that circumvented Congressional
processes; a new Department of Homeland Security
(where did that word “homeland” even come
from?); a proliferation of increasingly muscular
intelligence agencies; and a new brand of
“legal” scholarship that justified both
torture and indefinite detention, while tucking
secret
black sites away in foreign countries. All
this as the United States went to war against “terrorism”
-- against, that is, an idea, a fringe sentiment
that, no matter how heavily weaponized, had been
marginalized until the United States put it on
the map by declaring “war” on it.
The
U.S. then invaded and occupied big time,
including a country that had nothing to do with
the terrorists who had attacked us, and we’ve
been at war ever since at a heavy cost -- now
inching toward
$5 trillion. Conservative estimates of how
many people have been killed in the many war
zones of what used to be called the Global War
on Terror is
1.3 to 2 million. The number of U.S.
military personnel who have lost their lives is
easier to put a number to:
more than 7,000, but that
doesn’t count private contractors (aka
mercenaries), or those (far more difficult to
quantify) who later
committed suicide. Now, President Trump has
begun adding to this bloody death toll, having
ordered his first (disastrous) strike, a Special
Operations raid on Yemen, which killed
as many as 30 civilians, including children,
and resulted in the death of an American Navy
SEAL as well.
September 11th was a long time ago. But I
finally fell in love with my country in the days
following that awful attack. I saw for the first
time a certain strain of patriotism that swept
me away, a strain that says we are stronger
together than alone, stronger than any blow that
strikes us, stronger in our differences,
stronger in our unities. I’m talking about the
kind of patriotism that said: don’t you dare
tell us to go to Disney World, Mr. President!
(That was, of course, after George W. Bush had
assured us that, while he made war, our
response as citizens to 9/11 should be to “get
down to Disney World in Florida. Take your
families and enjoy life, the way we want it to
be enjoyed.”)
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Not For Profit - For Global
Justice
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Instead
of heeding that lame advice, some of us went out
and began to try to solve problems and build
community. I had read about it in books -- the
labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s --
but I hadn’t seen it myself, hadn’t been a part
of it before, and I fell in love.
Of
course, the drumbeat for war started instantly
in Washington and was echoed throughout the
nation, but many of us -- the intended victims
of that attack -- said “our grief is not a cry
for war.” We circled around the victims’
families; we reminded America that it wasn’t
only lawyers and hedge-fund managers who died
that day, but cooks and couriers and homeless
people and undocumented immigrants, too.
We
pulled people from the rubble. We made the
“pile” a place of sacred memory long before a
huge monument and gift shop were erected there.
We honored the first responders who died, we
stood up for Muslims and Arabs and all those
whom ignorance scapegoated. We marched against
war in Afghanistan and then in far vaster
numbers against war in Iraq. We called for an
international police response to those acts of
terrorism -- that weapon of the weak, not the
powerful -- instead of the unilateral,
militarized approach adopted by the Bush
administration. We celebrated, and saw as a
strength, New York’s incredible diversity. We
made art and music and poetry. We prayed in all
languages to all the names of God.
The
Donald, a One-Man 9/11
I guess
I’ve been thinking about September 2001 again
because, only weeks into his presidency, Donald
Trump already seems like a one-man 9/11. He’s
ridden roughshod over business as usual without
even a geopolitical crisis or calamity as an
excuse -- and that’s not so surprising since
Trump himself is that calamity.
With a
razor-thin mandate, considerable bluster, and a
voracious appetite for alt-facts (lies),
he’s not so much tipping over the apple cart as
declaring war on apples, carts, and anything
else beginning with the letter A or C.
It
seems almost that random and chaotic. In these
weeks, he’s shown a particular appetite for
upending convention, saying screw you to just
about everyone and everything, while scrapping
the rules of decorum and diplomacy. With a sweep
of his pen and a toss of his hair, he
takes away visas, nullifies months of work
by advocates for refugees, and sends U.S.
Special Forces off
to kill and be killed. With a few twitches
of his thumbs he baits Mexico, disses China, and
throws shade at
federal judges. With a few ill-chosen words
about
Black History month (comments that would
have been better written by my 10 year old), he
resurrects Frederick Douglass, disparages
inner cities, and slams the “dishonest”
media again (and again and again). His
almost-month as president can be described as
busy and brash, but it barely hides the banality
of greed.
Flying Our
Flag
Sure,
Donald Trump’s a new breed, but perhaps in the
end our resistance will make him the aberration
he should be, rather than the new normal. So
many of his acts are aimed at demeaning,
degrading, demonizing, and denigrating, but he’s
already failing -- by driving so many of us to a
new radical patriotism. I’m not the only one
falling in love with this country again and this
love looks like resistance -- a resistance that,
from the first moments of the Trump era, has
seemed to be almost everywhere you looked.
Even at
his inauguration, a group of young people stood
on chairs wearing matching sweatshirts spelling
out
R-E-S-I-S-T in big letters. They had
positioned themselves in the inner ring of the
Capitol and were loud and visible as Chief
Justice John Roberts swore the new president
into office. The environmental group
Greenpeace greeted Trump’s White House with
a
daring banner drop from a crane across the
street -- a huge, bright banner also emblazoned
with RESIST. Pink woolen “pussy hats” were
popularized by the
Women’s March, a global event and possibly
the
largest demonstration in American history,
one that rekindled our hope and
strengthened our resolve on inauguration
weekend. Now, those hats help us recognize and
salute one another.
We’re
working hard. We’re
tying up the phone lines all over Capitol
Hill, turning town halls into
rowdy rallies for health care and human
rights, shelling out money to support Planned
Parenthood, the ACLU, the
immigration lawyers fighting for people
barred from the U.S. and the closest
Black Lives Matter chapter. We’re
getting organized,
getting trained,
getting prepared, and
getting connected. And we’re doing it all
with a sense of humor: the Bowling Green
Massacre
Victims Fund?
Priceless!
We are,
in short, resisting in old ways and new.
Given
my background, it’s no surprise that I’m not a
flag waver. While growing up, I learned a lot
more about what was wrong with my country than
about what was right with it. But I’m seeing so
much that’s right about it in this new Trump era
of engagement or, if you prefer, call it radical
patriotism. I’m mad... I’m scared... I’m
hopeful... I’m still in love -- more so than
ever -- with this country Trump is trying to
hijack.
I don’t
live in a big city any more. I’m not a scrappy
kid in my early thirties either. I’m a mother of
three kids and a homeowner. I’ve sunk my roots
in a small, struggling, stalwart community along
Connecticut’s eastern shoreline and I’m planning
to live here for the rest of my life.
New London
is a community of 27,000 or so, poor and
diverse. It’s almost a majority-minority
community, in fact. We’re home to three
refugee families settled from Syria and
Sudan. We have a good school system, getting
better all the time. Every Wednesday, the
chefs at the middle school up the street
from my house cook a meal, open the cafeteria,
and invite the whole community to eat dinner for
five dollars per person. I went with my girls a
couple of weeks ago for Cajun shrimp stew and
white rice. The room was full and the mood was
high. Young professionals and hipsters with kids
ate alongside folks who had just stood in line
for an hour and a half for a free box of food
from the United Way across the street and gotten
a free meal coupon as well for their troubles.
New
London’s mayor held
a press conference soon after in the lobby
of City Hall where the heads of all the city
departments asserted their support for
immigrants and refugees in our community. The
last city council meeting was standing room only
as people pushed an ordinance to keep
fracking waste out of our area.
The
weekend after the inauguration, my husband and I
raised a flagpole on the second story porch of
our house and hung a rainbow peace flag from it.
I look up at it every morning waving in the
breeze and I’m glad I live here, in this
country, in this moment of radical upsurge and a
new spirit of patriotism.
I’m
talking to my neighbors. I’m going to city
council meetings. I’m writing
letters to the editor of our local paper.
I’m taking my Sudanese neighbors grocery
shopping and to the post office. I’m loaded for
bear (nonviolently, of course) if anyone tries
to mess with them.
My kids
are the anti-Trumps. “We went to the women’s
march in Hartford, Mommy,” two-year-old Madeline
shouts every time she hears the word woman.
She knows enough to be proud of that. “Look,
Mommy! They have a flag like ours!” says
four-year-old Seamus with delight whenever he
sees another rainbow, even if it’s just a
sticker. He’s learning to recognize our tribe of
patriots.
We’re
engaged, we’re awake, we’re in love, and no one
is taking our country from us.
Frida Berrigan, a
TomDispatch regular, writes the
Little Insurrections blog for
WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of
It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By
Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood,
and lives in New
London, Connecticut.
Follow
TomDispatch on
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Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch
Book, John Feffer's dystopian novel
Splinterlands, as well as Nick Turse’s Next
Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book,
Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a
Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2017 Frida Berrigan
