Unicorns, Sasquatch, Pro-American Liberals and other Mythological Creatures

(I go by the nickname, “happyleftie” and you can find me here on Twitter.)

When the geographically- and semantically-challenged Sarah Palin made her comment about being happy to be in a “Pro-American” part of the country, I was offended less by the inanity of the comment than the idea that being a liberal city-dweller was somehow equivalent to being “Anti-American”.

You see, I am a liberal. And I consider myself very “Pro-American” and a patriot. I am also an immigrant and have travelled to numerous countries, and am very vocal online. As such, I have often found myself defending our country from the criticism of foreigners who are phobic of anything American. Now, I find myself being attacked by both rightwing Americans and sanctimonious foreigners.

So, is it really possible to be a liberal supporter of Barack Obama and be “Pro-American”? You betcha!

I believe that some of us are liberal because we actually care about the founding principles of this country rather than its trappings and symbols. Questioning oneself is a form of self improvement – therefore, being constructively critical of your own country is a form of patriotism. It is when the criticism is mindless and cynical that it crosses over into the type of Anti-Americanism that Americanophobes indulge in.

Having said that, I believe that it is equally wrong to be dogmatically patriotic or religious, or both, as many in the extreme right tend to be.

When Obama said that we are perfecting our country, and when Michelle said that for the first time she was really proud of her country – that is when they got me. I actually felt I understood what she meant – that our country, during many times in its history, failed to live up to its ideals.

When I was younger, I flirted with what people may consider Anti-Americanism. I went through a phase where I felt that nothing was right about the Untied States. I found it fashionable to be cynical and blame the world’s problems on our country.

But, as I grew older and perhaps more mature in my thinking, I came to realize the United States, through its ups and downs, had the mechanism to re-invent and improve itself. I realized that our country’s major failures occurred when it strayed from its ideals of equality, freedom of speech, religion, and expression, and the principle of a representative democracy. In my early teens, I lived under a dictatorship, so I know just how valuable these ideals are, especially when they were trampled and discarded. You might guess that during the last eight years, I had frequent flashbacks to my early teens.

Ironically, my most recent epiphany about our system and its ability to fix its problems came from an unlikely source – I was on a business trip to Ethiopia, talking politics with a local lawyer over dinner. He was formerly a political commissar in the Communist Ethiopian army and was now a successful businessman in Addis Ababa, thriving under an imperfect but reasonably stable democracy.

He recounted the number of constitutions that Ethiopia had written, ratified, and adopted over the years. He said they all failed “because of personal agendas”. Then he startled me by saying that there was one easy way to solve the problem – simply by adopting the US constitution, verbatim. His simple statement reflected the wisdom of an objective outsider with a problem to solve. The ideals that our country was founded upon and give it its sustainability are almost perfectly encapsulated by two documents – the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Our current government, along with a few past administrations, had sought to subvert what this Ethiopian lawyer considered the epitome of legal codes.

The strength of our country lies in our loyalty to these ideals and the existence of these two documents as our collective memory of these ideals. The strength of our country does not lie in platitudes and slogans, but in our ability to aggregate the voices of our people to protect and if necessary, restore these ideals.

Last Tuesday, November 4, 2008, those voices were heard. We showed the world the resiliency of our democracy, and that we can in fact gather the collective will to restore our nation to the ideals from which it had strayed.

So, for those who still think that liberals cannot be patriots, think again. Blind loyalty without discernment of what is wrong and what needs to be fixed is just that – blindness. Finding fault in our government when it strays, refusing to be silenced, and gathering our collective will to fix what has been broken – there lies true patriotism.