Looking for an America to Celebrate

I have a tough time with the Fourth of July. I enjoy the fireworks and the grilling out, but I have difficulty genuflecting before my homeland. Do not get me wrong: I love this country deeply and am grateful that I was fortunate enough to be born within its borders. But many people today will proclaim that we are the greatest country in the world, a shining city on a hill in a dark global landscape.

And I am not so sure about that.

It is not solely because our present government seems to be a moral and ethical dumpster fire. To be sure, it is stupid difficult to celebrate a country that treats children the ways in which children at our border have been treated. But the reality is we have always had our flaming piles of garbage. Drone strikes that have killed innocent people, sending weapons to what turn out to be terrorist organizations, a place where many a person has to fight tooth and nail uphill because they are not a white man.

To be sure, there is good amongst those stories, but the tenor of Independence Day pretends as if the bad didn't happen. To some people, it seems almost blasphemous to mention the wrong that this country has done. Yet it is hard to shake that we took this land, killed and subjugated the people living here. It is difficult to forget the backs of slaves on which much of the country was built and how those people were seen as property; the ugliness of the Three-Fifths compromise etched into the Constitution. It's slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, "go back to where you came from," and All Lives Matter.

To be sure, there are always going to be those ugly spots when you go back in history. Our flaws and shortsightedness do not spare a single one of us. It's true with people who lived in the Bible and thought of women as property, it's true of the founders of this country, and I am sure it will be true of me.

And maybe it would be easier for me to celebrate America if we had a little more humility about our place in the world. Even what we call ourselves--America--reeks of an arrogance that ignores the reality that over 650 million people live in an America that is not this country. We always want to display our strength, exceptionalism, and might. But we are not always the best. We are not always the city on the hill. Sometimes we are the shadows. Yet we don't apologize. I wonder if I could stomach the bombast if we took time to repent on this day too.

I recognize that many of these qualms come from the perspective of my faith. As a Christian, I understand my ultimate allegiance is to God who transcends borders. I feel an obligation to see any human being, regardless of where they live, as someone for whom I should love and care about their well-being. Those factors make nationalism a tough sell for me.

I don't want to leave this country. I love it. But I love it enough to say that we can do better. We always could have done better. And I wish I felt like I could say that out loud without it being misconstrued as hatred for this place which I have called home. I wish that our notion of God blessing America was not one in which we are great and mighty, but one in which we would be a blessing to others.

I am looking for an America to celebrate and the difficult thing is one cannot separate the good harvest from the weeds. Peppered throughout our history are moments of goodness and beauty alongside moments of vile hatred and craven selfishness. The Civil Rights era sits right beside virulent racism. "All men are created equal" lies next to the fact that what was really meant by "men" was white, land-owning males. Can you celebrate something that complicated if you don't acknowledge the shortcomings? Maybe you can. I'm not sure.

I guess if there is one thing I can celebrate, it is the idea of America. I am not sure if we ever really lived up to that idea of being a place of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I'm not sure if we have truly been the place that welcomes the poor, the tired, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free; we at least seem to forget about it every generation or so. But those ideas about the United States are worth celebrating. I think those good moments in our national history are the times in which our reality intersects with the dream. Maybe I can celebrate what this country can be and those moments in which we somehow manage to graze the stars. Perhaps that is what I'll try to do.

I am thankful for this country. It has been a good home and I pray it will continue to be a good home not just for me, but for everyone within its borders. I mourn the evil of what we have been and are, I celebrate the good of what we have been and are, and I hope that we can be more than what we have been and what we are.