Category Archives: patriotism

Journey to the Air Force

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Forty years ago today, I began my enlistment in the U.S. Air Force. I don’t remember many details of the day I arrived at the Los Angeles MEPS (Military Enlistment Processing Station), but getting there was an interesting and unexpected journey….

As a teen, I had the privilege of living in Bonn, [West] Germany, the postwar capital, where I attended Bonn American High School. My fellow students were the kids of American Embassy staff, military, and, like me, civilian expats; as well as international diplomats and a few local Germans—overall, the upper crust of the international diplomatic community.

I played on the school’s football and soccer teams, wrestled for a year, and was the basketball team’s manager one season. Those teams traveled to countless American and international schools for games—Hahn Air Base, Bremerhaven, three different schools in Brussels, AFCENT in the Netherlands, and more—where I got glimpses of a different life: the enlisted men and women who make up the bulk of the military.

As much as I loved my experience in Bonn, nothing I saw on those bases attracted me. The buildings were boxy and lifeless; the airmen and soldiers no less so. The marching, the olive drab “pickle suits” … nothing called my name and said, “join us.” And nowhere in my family history was I aware of a military heritage. (Only years later would I learn of the Revolutionary War-era Fort Ehl in New York’s Mohawk Valley, or a great uncle(?) who had served in the Army.)

Memories of those bases were in my mind when, during my freshman year of college at Seattle Pacific University, I swore to my roommate that I would never enlist in the military.

But that year at college was hard for me. I loved the experiences and friendships I made on the crew team and I had fun working for the Seattle Repertory Theatre; but I was still lonely and disengaged both academically and spiritually. I had to leave.

After a second summer working at Forest Home, a family camp in the San Bernardino mountains, I decided to stay in Los Angeles to work. I found a job working nights in the photo processing plant of a grocery store chain: I spent eight hours putting stickers over the flaps of self-sealing envelopes with newly-developed photos. Not exactly a career track. (Funny thing, though: when I left after four months, my coworkers gave me a gold Cross pen and pencil set worth probably $50 at the time and over $100 now.)

That fall I rented a room in a house in La Puente. It was in my budget, but that’s about the only good thing about it. The owner’s husband (whom she’d married when she was 15) was a truck driver who’d been in a major accident and was in a rehab facility in Bakersfield. Just to survive, she rented out two of the three bedrooms in the house, forcing her 16-year-old kleptomaniac son to live in the garage. She lived in the master suite … and I mean lived: it was her bedroom, bath, living room, and kitchen. She kept nothing in the kitchen itself, saying that her son had stolen and sold most of the pots and pans for drugs. Her 19-year-old daughter lived elsewhere with her boyfriend.

I think I’d lived and worked there for just a couple months before the loneliness and longing for home got the best of me and I found myself walking into the Air Force recruiter’s office. My experiences during high school had made it easy to choose between the branches, my scores on the ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) guaranteed me one of any five career fields I chose, and I would be able to leave for Basic Training not too soon and not too late … forty years ago today. January 27, 1984.

Letter to America

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A letter to my homeland, on the occasion of her 246th birthday.

As extended family gathered to celebrate my grandpa’s 80th birthday, with stories and much laughter around the table, my aunt made some snarky comment. I don’t remember what she said, and it doesn’t really matter because of what came after: Grandma, then 83 and quiet, looked over at her daughter and with a demure smile said very softly, “Careful, Barbara Jean. I can still take you out behind the woodshed.” Everyone roared … and everybody believed she would!

On a very different occasion—far more private and far more serious—my dad verbally took me out behind the woodshed with no more words than his mom had used. (Ironically, as I think about it now, it was around his own 80th birthday.) I’d been complaining about the challenges of a drawn-out job search and had casually suggested he could pull some strings to get me a one-time teaching opportunity. He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Randy, you’ve got a pride problem.” The words were so unexpected and cut so deeply that it was months before I could consider honestly what truth they might hold. (They still hurt, and it’s still hard to search for the truth in them.)

Why do I start this letter to my homeland with these two stories? Because America, it’s about time someone took you out behind the woodshed. It’s about time someone told you the truth about yourself—the truth you’ve stopped seeing, stopped believing, stopped wanting to believe.

Politicians won’t tell you the truth. Their jobs depend more on being popular than truthful.

The media won’t tell you the truth. Their jobs depend more on being first, fantastic, or sensational than on being truthful.

Your opponents won’t tell you the truth. Their jobs depend on you not knowing the truth.

So who can you count on to tell you the truth? A friend. And a friend will speak the truth—even when the truth is hard—precisely because she is a friend.

There is an ancient proverb that says, “faithful are the wounds of a friend.” That is truth. But it doesn’t feel like it. No one likes to hear a friend say, “you messed up there,” or “you were wrong.” It doesn’t feel good. Sometimes it can even break the relationship. But sometimes the truth is so important that it’s worth risking that break. Sometimes it takes that hard truth and that risk to wake a friend to the painful reality they needed to hear.

And that is why I am writing you this letter: to speak the truth, as from a friend. For friend I am.

America, you are not living your best … not for yourself, and not for others. On all sides, voices clamor to preserve democracy and the “American way.” Yet many of those voices, on all sides, are using decidedly undemocratic means, behaving like children and bullies: children who pout and stomp their feet and throw a fit when they don’t get their way, bullies who rely on brute force to subdue any who would oppose them.

This is not the way of democracy, it is not living under the rule of law that has been the bedrock of that democracy, and the preservation of your life for two-and-a-half centuries.

America, you are better than this; it is time to show your better self. Grow up. Learn anew to disagree without division, the art of civil discourse. Learn again the laws and freedoms—and constraints—embedded in your constitution. Learn what it means to adapt centuries-old laws and language to 21st century society, what it is and can be and should be to live under the two jurisdictions of state and nation. Learn the strength and power of living not for yourself, but for others. For only when individuals and nations live for others will our own lives be truly preserved.

A nation divided against itself cannot stand. If the United States of America is to thrive, the states of America must be united against all enemies, foreign and domestic, without and within. Today, as we celebrate our independence, the greatest enemy may be the enemy within.

Why Jan 6 Matters

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Not even during the Civil War was the Confederate Flag brought into the U.S. Capitol.
Photo from NBC News. Click on photo for the article.

Recently I’ve read on social media the suggestion that the events of Jan 6, 2021, have less of an impact on our day-to-day lives than the price we are paying for gas (and, by extension, other prices).

May I suggest a longer view? We’ve been through economic slumps before. We’ve experienced “out of control” inflation before. I’m old enough to remember gas prices around $1 a gallon … and lines stretching around the block to buy gas (ironically, those were around the same era). I also remember paying the equivalent of $4-5 a gallon—around the same time (forty years ago)—in West Germany.

You know what? We survived. We survived the energy crisis of the 1970s. We survived the burst of the housing bubble. We survived the “crash” of 2008. We even survived the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. We can survive the current economic challenges (and yes, they are many).

What I don’t remember—because it hasn’t happened, certainly not in my lifetime—is an armed incursion of the U.S. Capitol by not just a few, but hundreds of “Americans” (I use the term loosely). There have been small-scale attacks, including at least two bombs (1971 and 1983). There was, it is believed, an attempted attack on 9/11/2001. But there has been nothing on the scale of what we saw on January 6 last year. In fact, I believe you have to go back to 1814 to find anything comparable—the burning of the Capitol. And that was done by a foreign force, not our nation’s own citizens.

The very survival of the United States of America has never been truly threatened by the price of gas or milk or wheat.

Two world wars did not threaten her survival as a nation. Yes, the Cold War with its nuclear arms race was a legitimate threat—a threat to the entire world, though, not just the US.

The only legitimate threat to our survival as a nation has come from the inside: the Civil War 160 years ago and, a year ago, the incursion into the U.S. Capitol. Regardless of who may have instigated that event—whether grass roots or the very top—the aim of mob was nothing less than the overthrow of democracy, and the assassination of the Vice President. (How else can one understand the chant, “Hang Mike Pence,” while a gallows and a noose were waiting outside?) What’s worse, it was all done in the name of democracy.

I don’t like paying nearly $7 a gallon for gas. But I’ll take that any day if I can live in a truly democratic republic: a nation in which the law rules, and the people—for all our faults and failures and disagreements—get to be part of making, changing, and unmaking that law. Even the laws I don’t like.

Does Jan 6, 2021 matter? More than the short-sighted want to admit.

Inauguration Day 2021—A Day of Peace and Hope

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Four years ago today I was substitute teaching in a familiar classroom of fifth graders. After a contentious presidential election campaign, I thought the history lesson of watching the inauguration would be good for my students: they could watch as two very different sides would come together under the banner of unity to celebrate the peaceful transition of power in the world’s oldest democracy. Though personally disappointed in the result of the election, I nonetheless held out a modicum of hope that the new president, through his choices of advisors and cabinet officials, could lead the nation forward. I was wrong on both counts.

As the inauguration preliminaries played out on the big screen, most students quietly did their morning work, largely uninterested in the distant events in our nation’s capital  A few, whose parroted views had been overly enthusiastic (for ten-year-olds) throughout the previous fall, continued their boisterous cheering of their candidate’s victory. Others, more reserved in defeat, sat in silence.

Then I saw her: one normally-bubbly student sitting with head down, unable to focus on the page on her desk, tears streaming down her face. I knelt down beside her and asked what she was thinking.

“I’m afraid my family will be deported,” she replied.

I knew nothing of her background beyond that she was Hispanic. Were her parents illegal immigrants? Had she been born in the U.S. or in Mexico? In that moment, none of that mattered to me. All that mattered was that one of my students, a ten-year-old girl, was not celebrating democracy but fearing for her own security, her family’s security, her future. Far more devastating than an election loss was, for this girl, the prospect of losing her family and likely the only home she had ever known. She was afraid—legitimately, I think—not only because of the words she had heard on the nightly news from the man becoming president, but because those same words were coming from the lips of her fellow students.

As adults, we have learned to distinguish between the bombastic speeches we hear or read and what we can expect in reality. Friends, neighbors, and politicians alike will often speak far more boldly from behind the safe wall of a camera or social media, but never act on their bold speech or thinly-veiled threats. Fifth graders haven’t yet learned to separate that.

As I sought to comfort and give hope to my young student, I was caught in a poignant, agonizing moment that portended what would lay ahead in ways I would never have imagined … or, indeed, feared. Never in my wildest dreams did I consider that just two weeks before the next inauguration, our nation’s capitol building would come under attack not from a foreign enemy, but from within, from Americans fighting for their own distorted view of democracy. Never did I imagine that the president whose inauguration that little girl feared would be accused by long-time allies—members of his own party—of inciting an insurrection against his own capitol. And yet that is precisely what has taken place in the past two weeks.

And so on this Inauguration Day in 2021 I watched with a greater hope as our nation once again celebrated democracy’s greatest tradition: a peaceful transition of power. It was, again, a poignant moment, historic not simply as every inauguration has been historic, but because of the firsts: the first woman, first African-American, first Asian-American vice president (sworn in by the first Latina Supreme Court justice); the oldest first-term president (significant in a myriad of ways!); the first time in more than a century that the outgoing president has been absent from the inauguration. It was a poignant moment because of the pandemic that has gripped our nation and the world for the past ten months. There will be no comparison of crowd sizes this year, but the Capital Mall was resplendent with thousands of flags representing the nation, the states, the territories.

And it was poignant for me because of the hope I feel again: hope that our nation can begin to heal, hope that we can begin to put division and disunity behind us, hope that we can rejoin the nations of the world in working together for peace and prosperity for all. It won’t be easy. Millions still grieve their candidate’s loss; many still mistakenly—or willfully—believe that the election was fraudulent. Many of us—myself included—still have questions about the new administration and its commitment to values we hold. It will take all of us putting aside our differences in order to move forward in unity.

And yet today I am convinced that we can walk through the hard days ahead with hope. And hope is one thing that has been in desperately short supply these past four years.

Teaching Children to Lie

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Have you ever stopped to consider how often and in what ways we may be teaching children to lie? I’m not talking about birthday surprises; you’ll have to work out the ethics of that on your own. I’m also not talking about corporate espionage or political campaigning; those, too, you’ll need to figure out on your own. The lies I’m talking about fall somewhere between those two points of the spectrum; between, “don’t tell your sister what we got her” and “if I’m elected I will….” The lies I’m talking about are subtler, and they actually sound good—morally good, that is. We want them to be true, and they could be true, and maybe they even should be true. But….

Let me start with what I think will be the easier one, both to admit and to do something about: “Say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Go ahead; tell your brother you’re sorry.” You’ve heard that, haven’t you? Chances are you heard it from your parents and maybe you’ve even heard it from your own lips. It sounds so good; we desperately want it to be true, to be a genuine admission of sorrow. And it seems that it should be so easy to say, especially when the offending child hurt her sister entirely on accident! But kids don’t do sorrow and regret well—it is, for some reason, too closely linked to shame and guilt—and so to say “I’m sorry” means to admit guilt, and kids don’t want to do that. All we want as parents is to train our children to feel sorrow at someone else’s pain, and so we ask them to say, “I’m sorry.” And sometimes we compel them to say it…even when it really is a lie. After all, if I don’t feel sorrow, isn’t it a lie to say that I do?

Now, I understand that sometimes words must be said before the truth of them can be known and felt by the speaker. That is, sometimes saying “I’m sorry” will lead to, rather than spring from, genuine sorrow. In my own marriage I have often needed to express forgiveness before I felt forgiving; and in that statement of faith and obedience I begin to experience the freeing power of real forgiveness. But ritual for ritual’s sake seldom accomplishes that. Teaching our children to feel and express genuine sorrow when they have wronged another is far more important than teaching them to utter a lie. It’s also much harder.

The other lie we teach our children came to my mind today and I expect I’m going to get into trouble with some people for saying this, because it’s not in the realm of parenting but politics…and faith. And the intersection of those two is a hazardous one, wherein lies the wreckage of many an ideal of one or the other, each claiming right of way where neither is granted such right. But first, some background:

I pledge allegiance to my flag and to the Republic for which it stands—one Nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

That doesn’t sound quite right, does it? At least not for those of us born after World War II. But those twenty-three words comprise the pledge originally penned by Francis Bellamy in August 1892 as part of an effort to stir up patriotism among schoolchildren in a nation whose patriotic fervor had waned since the end of the Civil War. It is a compelling story, which deserves to be read in the words of the Pledge’s own author. [1]

The pledge has been changed three times since its original writing; the first change, two months after writing, belonged to author and was the addition of the word “to” before “the republic.” Thirty years later, over Bellamy’s objections, the American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution led a campaign to change the Pledge’s words from, “my Flag,” to “the Flag of the United States of America.” Another thirty years later, in 1954, the Knights of Columbus led the charge to add the words, “under God.” [2]

It sounds good, doesn’t it? At least for a Christian, and perhaps for some of other religions who appreciate the reminder that we live under the sovereignty of a divine being. Yet the Pledge of Allegiance to our nation’s flag contains, for many, a lie; and in seeking to compel the ritual recitation of the Pledge, we are teaching those children to lie in the same way as when we compel them to say, “I’m sorry.” Many children—especially immigrants (legal or otherwise)—have not shifted allegiance from their homeland to these United States. Perhaps they have escaped with their parents from a tyranny they do not even understand; all they know is they left in the middle of the night and can no longer see their friends or their relatives, and they are alone and strangers in a land where they do not even speak the language.

Those two simple words, “under God,” were added more than sixty years after the original writing of the Pledge of Allegiance? The Pledge’s author (according to his granddaughter) would have shuddered at the addition, having left the church the year before writing the Pledge. [2] As a Christian I’m fine with the words, in part because I grew up with them and in part because I willingly and knowingly submit to my God and pray that my nation does, as well. Yet the phrase does nothing to unite us as Americans, which was a primary intent of the Pledge when written. Rather, the phrase serves more to divide. After all, though more than three-fourths of Americans identify as Christian, there are also millions of Jews and Muslims, not to mention adherents of other faiths—many of which are polytheistic—as well as an increasing number of people claiming no religious identity.

I felt some of this discrepancy myself in elementary school, when my family moved to Canada. For five years, my school days started not with the pledge, but with the singing of “O Canada.” It always felt a little odd to sing, “O Canada! Our home and native land!” Home was true, but native was certainly not. Nor was I ever sure that I would “stand on guard for thee.”

The last line of the Pledge of Allegiance is perhaps most important of all, for it claims that in this great Republic we hold fast to the ideal of “liberty and justice for all.” If we truly believe that, then why do we insist on the divisive words, “under God”? Let us instead live humbly—as did the Lord we proclaim—and in that humility attract others to what it really means to live under God.

 

Footnotes:

[1] Bellamy, Francis, “The Story of the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag”, University of Rochester Library Bulletin, Vol. VIII, Winter 1953. 13 July 2014. <http://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?PAGE=3418>.

[2] Baer, Dr. John W., “The Pledge of Allegiance A Short History”. 13 July 2014.<http://www.oldtimeislands.org/pledge/pledge.htm>.