"Us, the living": Why I Won't Celebrate Patriot Day

[K-Check]

“Us, the living”: Why I won’t celebrate “Patriot Day” on 9-11

Every year, the prestigious academic school where I teach celebrates “Patriot Day” with a school assembly, replete with all the martial pageantry and grim remembrance one would expect. It is, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg, “altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”

Yet every year, I am made uncomfortable by the ceremony. It has been difficult to articulate why. I love my country, and although I never served myself, I come from a family who has served. Among them is my father, who, outraged by the North Korean seizure of the U.S.S. Pueblo in 1968, enlisted in the Navy, and spent some of the Vietnam years serving as an aid to an admiral in the Pentagon – one of the buildings hit by the 9-11 hijackers. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a marine in the Pacific during World War Two, and arrived at Pearl Harbor not long after the Japanese sneak attack. To say that I am proud to be the stock of these men would be considerable understatement.

It is I think because of – and not in spite of – their service and patriotism that I reject Patriot Day, or any commemoration of 9-11 that is limited to somber reflection.

My reason always returns me to that two-minute speech given on a field in Pennsylvania in 1863. “It is for us, the living,” Lincoln said, “to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” Us, the living. Roosevelt, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, likewise harkened to the living, saying that “inevitable triumph” would come only “through the unbounding determination of our people.” What these men knew, and what seems absent from our cultural reflections on 9-11, is that it is not enough to reflect and to mourn the dead merely. In the past, when this nation has been beset by violent tragedy, that mourning has been coupled with – and possibly exceeded by – an unflinching resolve. The resolve has not simply been for revenge and remembrance, but for that most-American of all ideals, self-improvement.

Roosevelt’s speech mobilized the living. Americans turned a grossly outdated, outmatched and out-manned military, in four years, to the world’s supreme fighting force. Simultaneously, a struggling economy transformed virtually overnight into an economic and industrial powerhouse with an output that dwarfed that of any other nation. The war industry opened up a boom of middle-class jobs, which created a skyrocketing demand and implored even more hiring. Roosevelt reminded Americans that they did not just have to remember and reflect –they had to act. And they did.

Lincoln’s speech also called on the living. He implored Americans to resolve that their fellow citizens will not have died in vain and that America should instead undergo a “new birth of freedom.” The Emancipation Proclamation, issued earlier that year, provided just such a new birth of freedom to many of the 1 in 8 of our fellow citizens who had been held as slaves by their own countrymen. In his second inaugural address, he reminded the living of the founding fathers’ vision, forgotten in years of bitter internecine fighting: malice towards none, charity for all. We owe it, he said, to the orphans and widows, to “achieve and cherish a just, and lasting peace.”

Patriot Day is a fitting and proper lament for the dead. But the language of Public Law 107-89, designating 9-11 as Patriot Day, reminds us, the living, of the difference between past crises of American identity and our own crisis. “In the aftermath of the attacks,” the law says, “the people of the United States stood united in providing support for those in need.” The people “stood” together, in the “aftermath.” The visions of Roosevelt and Lincoln – and the Americas they oversaw – were not limited to the aftermath, nor were they limited to the past tense; instead, they were bound to the unlimited future.

When my reflections are limited to the past, then Patriot Day becomes a time for lament indeed. This year marks the tenth anniversary of those attacks. In that time, we have become a country that accepts torture as necessary and legal. We have become a country that accepts the contradictory illogic of the righteousness of initiating a war in self-defense. We have become a country willing, and sometimes eager, to sacrifice freedom for the illusion of security. We have become a nation which, contrary to our birth in the Age of Reason, disbelieves inconvenient science. We have become a nation so politically divided and unable to engage in civil disagreement that a speech by the President of the United States was interrupted, for the first time in history, by a member of congress. We have become a country without empathy, where the poor, unfortunate, and old are made to sacrifice for the benefits of a few, where social safety nets created to preserve the basic human dignity of unfortunate families are mistrusted and condemned as wasteful, their beneficiaries labeled lazy, parasitic, or worse; where retirement benefits earned over the course of a lifetime by hard-working citizens are criticized as unfair, unaffordable privileges or “entitlements”; where, rather than charity for all, we have suspicion and sometimes malice for anyone different, whether that difference is political, economic, racial, sexual, religious, or something else.

This is not the America for which my father enlisted. Were he alive, my grandfather would be ashamed, confused, and embarrassed by so much of what has gone on here since 9-11. Yet for many, including most of my students, who were only four or five years old when the planes hit the towers, this has been the only America they have ever known. I think of that often.

This, to me, is the damnable part of Patriot Day. Where it should be an imperative for us, the living, to “take increased devotion” to the America that existed before 9-11, to commemorate those we lost with action toward preserving and improving the America in which they died, to rededicate ourselves to the ideals to which Lincoln so succinctly aspired, and which once made America unique in the history of the world, we are instead absolved of responsibility. We are instead told the lie that the world changed on 9-11. The world did not change. We did.

Since 9-11 we have suppressed what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. The strengths of America have ever been rooted in the hope, optimism, and compassion extended to others, whether they come from without or within our country. Once we welcomed, rather than scorned, the tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to be free. And while certainly throughout our short history the promise of America has nearly always exceeded its reality, it is exactly that promise that set it apart from other nations. Until we regain sight of who we were before those senseless attacks, the dead of 9-11 will, as Lincoln feared for the dead of Gettysburg, have died in vain, regardless of what ceremonies we commit to their commemoration. Until we, the living, remember the words of Lincoln’s first inaugural – that “we are not enemies, but friends,” and that although “passion may have strained it must never break our bonds of affection” with each other and with others, Patriot Day will remain for me an empty gesture, a hollow platitude from the country in which I was born and raised, and yet today find myself a foreigner. And every Patriot Day, while most remember the Americans who were lost that day, I will remember the America who was lost, and wonder when we will be challenged to find it again.

[Ohio Joe]

1. Patriots Day is in April - nt