I’M A PATRIOT — always have been, always will be. My patriotism isn’t new, and it isn’t nice. But it’s deep. It doesn’t translate easily into bumper stickers. That doesn’t diminish its strength.
I inherited my love of country from my parents, particularly from my father. He was born in this country, the son of a Japanese immigrant, in 1932. Following President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942, he and his entire family were placed in an internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho. He was shipped there at age 10. He left two and a half years later, a year before the war ended.
The camps were a gross violation of America’s Constitution. The US government has since apologized to Japanese-Americans and offered $20,000 per survivor, in reparation for property and livelihood lost during the internments. The money, generous though it was, works out to less than 10 cents on the dollar of what Japanese-Americans lost.
But despite it all, my Japanese-American forebears passed down no resentment toward this country, no sense of bitterness about one of the US government’s gravest mistakes. Instead, I inherited an immigrant’s gratitude for America’s freedom and an immigrant’s appreciation of just how fragile that freedom can be. Patriotism, as I grew up understanding it, means constant vigilance.
If we’ve learned anything from history, it’s that during times of crisis we most need to keep watch over our government’s actions.
ON SEPTEMBER 11, I watched the Twin Towers crumble in real time on cable TV, while standing in a hotel in Quito, Ecuador. Desperate to get to New York (I was scheduled to fly home on September 13), I was traumatized and grieving. At one point, I ran into an American in a bookstore in Quito who asked me if I had been watching CNN. I began reeling off the latest headlines. And this young woman responded with complaints about US television coverage. She seemed to be saying that Americans shouldn’t take so much television news at face value. "I wish Americans would just think more," she said.
I turned and walked away. For once in my life, I just couldn’t listen to anything critical of America or Americans. If there was ever a piece of news to be taken at face value, I felt, it was the stark, inescapable image of the Twin Towers falling.
My reaction, at that moment, was understandable. On September 13, the count of the missing was still rising and planes remained unable to fly to New York. I was grieving, and not yet ready to take a step back and critique media coverage.
But my need to grieve first and analyze later wasn’t patriotism; likewise, my compatriot was tactless, not unpatriotic. One of the most obvious perks of living in the US is that you are always allowed to trash it. Even when people around you get offended, patriotism must always involve passionate and constructive criticism of the US. By speaking out against policies or cultural trends I disagree with, I try to hold the US to the highest standards of excellence, to everything I believe it stands for.
My time in Ecuador came at the end of a year-long stay in South America. Most of that time I spent living in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro. Rio is a beautiful, vibrant, amazing place. But it gave me a newfound appreciation for a host of blessings we North Americans often forget to count. For one thing, in Brazil I had to buy a phone line on the black market. For another, it seemed like the dogged newsmagazine Veja could dig up a whopping political scandal every week. Brazilians watched crooked senators siphon millions of taxpayer dollars into Swiss bank accounts and luxury properties. Then they watched the millions stay gone, even after the scandals had hit the press. In the US, we like to complain about voter apathy. In Brazil, Veja called on its readers to fight voter hopelessness.
In Brazil, I heard people compare believing in honest Brazilian politicians to believing in Santa Claus. But honest Brazilian politicians do exist, in significant numbers, and they’re fighting to exorcize corruption from their government. Activists and lawyers are fighting to reform the Brazilian justice system. Reformers are fighting to reduce the gaping abyss between rich and poor, which just about everyone in Brazil recognizes as a primary concern. The Brazilians who most loved their country, it seemed clear to me, were the ones working for change.
We live with a level of transparency and accountability in this country that we sometimes take for granted. But that transparency requires upkeep, and that accountability means nothing if we don’t actively hold our officials to account. We have so much to be thankful for. Take it for granted, and we might watch it disappear.
These days, we are asked to sacrifice openness — including open debate — to the exigencies of war. In the mainstream media, any challenge to how we are waging the war on terrorism is set up as a straw man of anti-patriotism. Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times writes that the public finds all voices questioning America’s war in Afghanistan "loopy and treasonous." Time magazine reports that "for the eternal skeptics, whose views were defined by Vietnam and its aftermath, the new patriotism represents a kind of homecoming."
For most Americans, however, patriotism doesn’t mean blind acceptance; it certainly doesn’t mean the renunciation of skepticism — whether of the post-Vietnam variety or any other brand. Most Americans can recognize the absurdity and atrocity of various US policies, past and present, and yet believe that the United States has come closer to creating a just and equal society than any other nation in the history of the world.
I know that a host of nations would challenge that latter claim. But it must be borne in mind that the US — a large, heterogeneous country — created a tide that raised the standard of living for millions upon millions of people. It has absorbed wave after wave of immigrants, from every ethnicity and country in the world. That doesn’t mean that each new wave hasn’t had to fight for equal access to the American dream. Each one has. But given the challenges we’ve faced, we’ve come closer to the free and open ideal than anyone else. We only get closer to that ideal through the patriotic efforts of reformers, activists, and critics of all stripes. And we can only take pride in how far we’ve come if we understand that the fight isn’t over.
It took a long time for Japanese-American activists to obtain redress for the injustice of the internment camps. But in the 1980s, the Supreme Court finally ruled the camps unconstitutional, essentially reversing its rulings from the 1940s. In 1982, President Reagan’s Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians published the following conclusion: "Executive Order 9066 was not justified by military necessity. The broad historical causes ... were race prejudice, war hysteria and failure of political leadership." The American government apologized, and paid reparations to living internees.
Who, then, were the patriots in 1942? The people who said nothing as their neighbors lost their lives’ work, who bought their fishing boats for a pittance because they knew the Japanese-Americans had no choice? Or the handful of Americans, many of them Jesuits and Quakers, who spoke out against the executive order and for the Constitution?
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