Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the Vietnam war, I'm struck by how often the presidents and generals said one thing to each other behind closed doors and another to the American people and journalists.
It was a time of carnage and confusion. Idealistic and patriotic young men of the Sixties were killed and terribly wounded in that war, yet those who came home didn't get the warm welcome that their fathers' generation had gotten after World War II. When the goal of a war is clear, the fighters are treated as heroes, but in the Vietnam War the country had little idea of why we were there and what we were fighting for--and the soldiers were maligned for a war they didn't create.
Now that we are hearing talk of nuclear war again, as we did in the Fifties and Sixties, the causes of potential war are more visible. North Korea is picking a fight and Forty Five is treating it like a playground bully treats another bully, puffing up his chest, name-calling, and making frightening threats that will impact the entire world if carried out.
While he's at it, he's is picking fights with the NFL players he considers un-patriotic; with celebrities, the media and anyone who doesn't "like" him; with members of his own party who don't vote the party line on health care. He's so unskilled at diplomacy that he goes for the only line of defense he knows--threatening to blow North Korea off the map with "fire and fury like the world has never known," calling their leader Rocket Man, and provoking them with a show of force by flying American planes near the DMZ.
Wars start at the top. Young soldiers are all too often pawns enacting fights they had no part in starting. While the leaders rant among themselves, appear smiling and suited up at PR events, and conceal what's going on for political gain, the soldiers in the trenches and deserts and jungles are called "boots on the ground"--as if reduced from whole humans to their military footwear.
With a pugnacious president at the helm, America is as divided as it was during the Civil War--though this time ideologically instead of geographically. Trump's rhetoric is bringing racists and White Supremacists out of the shadows. Battles between Americans are breaking out all over the country.
Is it patriotic that a man with the language of a playground bully recklessly endangers his own country and other countries?
The Celebrity in Chief is enraging the National Football League, the mainstream media, and anyone who dares to disagree with him.
It's easy to tweet out half-baked opinions and threats from a golf course, an airplane, or a tower somewhere. It's easy to stir the proverbial hornet's nest instead of working to create peace.
The peacemakers of the world, like Martin Luther King, don't live in towers, ivory or otherwise. They speak out clearly against prejudice and injustice. They go into harm's way if they have to and write letters from jail--as King did from Birmingham. Their words are beacons of inspiration for their followers and posterity. Their messages are not about themselves but about the principles that unite all people.
Trump has successfully done one thing: he's flattened language and thought to the lowest common denominator. His words and sentences are simplistic, confusing, contradictory, and mean-spirited. He insults disabled people, women, minorities, and other nationalities---while bragging about his "big, beautiful" apartment in New York to audiences of his base in Alabama and elsewhere.
No one is exempt from his insults--not even those whom a day or two before were praised as "the best." Size matters a lot to this guy, and he seems particularly fond of calling journalists and heads of states "little." Little Katy. Little George.
I feel like we're living inside a video game. If somebody doesn't soon take the game controls away, Trump's inept hands could create a war that will topple his prized real estate along with countless human beings, rich and poor, in America and elsewhere.
Patriotism is more than putting hand on heart or standing for the National Anthem. Patriotism is about speaking up about what matters.
I used to get a lump in my throat when I heard the National Anthem, but now I'm wishing we'd change the words to something about "purple mountains' majesty and amber waves of grain" rather than "bombs bursting in air." Taking a knee expresses love of freedom and equality as much as words in an anthem. If we curtail freedom to resist and speak truth, if we undermine the media, we risk losing the freedom we aspire to and fight for.
