[img]139|left|||no_popup[/img] I’d love to know what you, fair reader, did with your Independence Day weekend; the usual flag waving, fireworks watching, and holiday shopping, perhaps? I, myself, at least part of the time, watched a documentary about a black man falsely accused of raping and murdering a white woman in North Carolina. His justice was purely nineteenth century-style, minus the lynching. Only jailed for twenty years, the state of North Carolina finally released him ten years after exonerating DNA evidence was revealed. Some of my other time was spent watching a very nervous looking Manhattan District Attorney reassert his commitment to truth and facts – quite a statement from a prosecutor’s office. Far more often, we hear them tout their real agenda, getting convictions at any cost.
I did not, like my neighbors, hang a flag in salute of our country. Why, I wonder are we celebrating independence from the British Empire? Last time I looked, our old oppressors had universal healthcare, family leave, mandatory vacations, even pensions (assuming the Chicago school shock doctrine folks don’t have their way too soon). Other than that silly monarchy (the members of which in my humble opinion should be divested of their ill-gotten gains, and dethroned), the country from which we won our independence should be happy to have left our backward nation behind.
It seems odd that so many of us spend our time celebrating, what is in fact, an accident of birth. Some of us could easily be celebrating Bastille Day or Canada Day or any one of the national holidays that have sprouted up around the globe. Odder still is that patriotism, love and devotion to one’s country is often confused with nationalism or jingoism. Who can forget the political right’s recent monopolization of patriotism, scarily dressed up a lot like nationalism. Anyone who wasn’t on board with preemptive war or trickle down economics or anti-terrorism was labeled anti-American.
Look at Them and Look at Us
I am having a hard time reading about and watching the yearly national celebration with the glee that others feel. I have noticed that my friends who are immigrants or the children of, spend a lot of time telling me what a great thing it is to be American and what a great country America is. For them, I think it probably is. My family counts among its past kidnapping, slavery, sharecropping, domestic work, and years in what we now refer to as service professions. I look among my African-American friends as they drown in student loan debt, some unable to obtain “good” jobs in their chosen professions, their career paths stunted by racism. I realize that for my non-black immigrant friends, America must, indeed, appear to be the land of opportunity. I’ve watched my former, always white, employers gleefully interview and hire those smart Asian folks over the black folks with stellar resumes, because flawed notions about affirmative action transformed the latter into worthless credentials. I can see these newly minted Americans loving a country that treats them far better than those who’ve been here a long time.
Our nation is supposedly advanced and industrialized, and that’s supposed to be a good thing. Instead, industry is running the show. Whether you’re one of those outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, the Koch brothers, or your political party’s latest kowtow to the corporation of the moment, it’s hard to love a country that only appears to love its corporate citizens, who, of course, deserved to be treated just like natural persons (ironically, by virtue of the Civil War amendments).
It’s hard to feel patriotic about a nation steeped in oxymorons (or just the regular morons like Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann), such as worker’s rights, health insurance, family leave, or criminal justice.
Look How Workers Are Treated
Daily, I read about the assaults on the pensions of government workers, or efforts to lay off as many as possible from local, state and federal jobs. While I hate bureaucracy as much as the next person, that doesn’t mean workers need to be deprived of their pensions. Sure, elected officials made bad bargaining decisions and often gave unfunded benefits instead of raises, but we who continue to elect these folks have no one to blame but ourselves.
Then there’s our vaunted health care system. With my ninety-year-old grandmother in the hospital recently, I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing its continued failure. It’s no better in 2011 than it was when I last encountered it during my pregnancy (and happily left it behind). There are still too many tests, lavish spending on treatments, products of dubious value – as long as a health insurance company is paying – but little actual care.
I can’t even begin to understand how our so-called child-centered, family-friendly nation can pride itself on overworking its citizens leaving them little time for vacation, leisure and unaffordable, scanty child care. Again and again, women talk about being torn between necessary (cause we all like to eat) work, and the care of their children – the future citizens of this fine country. Then there are the dads who cannot take precious time from work to attend children’s activities, or families that can spend time with children who are out of school for almost half the days of the year. Any measures that have been taken to require employers to give even a few days of paid leave are booed down as infringing on the rights of corporate America.
For a few years early in my very short legal career, I encountered the criminal justice system. There is little justice there. From either angle, justice is not fair. Whether you take into account that all races are not enmeshed in the system in the same proportion as their population in this country, or you look at the sheer number of exonerations of innocent people who’ve been wrongly convicted, now that DNA testing is available in a small number of cases. What is there to love about a country whose many states have statutes attending the redress of wrongly convicted persons. If the criminal justice system were truly about seeking truth and playing fair, then these kinds of statutes would be all but unnecessary.
How can I, a citizen of this supposedly great nation, love a place that doesn’t appear to care about my health, my family or the future (or past for that matter) of people who look like me and my son?
For those of you who say I should be grateful, because only in this country could I get away with such speech, I say that statement is filled with hyperbole. I could have written and published this same essay in the United Kingdom as well as Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bermuda, Canada, and . . . you get the idea.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
