Independence

I need my country, I know that. It gives me security and opportunity, which are in short supply in many parts of the world. From time to time it has given me idealism and pride. Other times, it has disappointed me. In the same way my charismatic father’s bad behavior disillusioned and disappointed me. I learned of some of his worse misdeeds years after his death, when it was too late to confront him; and too late to undo my boyhood worship of him. 

Cognitive dissonance. That’s what psychologists call what I felt, still feel, for my father. It’s what I feel for my country too.

My relationship with both has been complicated. I loved being on the golf course with my father. I loved Fourth of July fireworks celebrating my country.

But my father had a dark side. He was charming and impulsively generous one moment, lecturing and badgering the next. Pull-up-a-chair-and-sit-down kind of lectures. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” kind of lectures

I didn’t know it at the time—he died at age 50, when I was 28–but my relationship with him turns out to have been training for my relationship with my country. He and our nation are the same: restless, rambunctious and brilliant, but with a streak of something like rage that comes out now and then and is truly terrifying. The kind that, after a while, makes you want to keep your distance.

One thing I knew about my father was that he would protect me. This wasn’t theoretical. He pulled me out of many scrapes, from making amends with the local police for my reckless plinking with a pellet gun, to hauling me out of the Duke University hospital where I was sleeping away my sophomore year with mononucleosis brought on by long bouts of staying up too late and sleeping through classes.

I took his protection for granted. I see that now. I also take my country’s protection for granted. I am insanely grateful for the security both my father and my country have given me. Period. Full stop.

But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t expect more. Security buys my gratitude, but not my love.

Love requires admiration. I didn’t admire the things I saw and later learned about my father’s darker impulses. The same is true for my country.

I never would have guessed some of the things he did, just as I never expected some of the things we Americans are doing now. He could be abusive. We, as a country, are being abusive too. To one another.

The thing about Dad’s misbehavior is that it was so out of character with the man I looked up to, the man he was most of the time. The same thing is happening with my country. I am shocked at the way we are treating one another. I thought we were better than we are acting now. 

I’ve never been a fan of nationalism. Not the kind that sends us to war, anyway. Of course we need to defend ourselves, but we didn’t need to invade Viet Nam or the Middle East. All we accomplished with those misadventures was making a sizable portion of the world that used to admire, or at least respect, us hate us.

As a young man, I moved to LA to get some space from Dad, to learn to be myself. To gain my independence. He died three years later. I often wonder what we would have thought of each other as he got older. What I would have said to him. And he to me. Whether I would have understood.

I won’t have that chance with him, but I do with my country. I’m trying to understand what is happening to us, but one thing I do know: we’re not behaving the way we ought to. We need to take to heart the advice my father, unironically, frequently gave me, which he no doubt picked up in his days in medical training on a US naval airbase: “Straighten up and fly right.”