The Global Warming Reader: A Century of Writing About Climate Change by Bill McKibben

Author:Bill McKibben [McKibben, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
ISBN: 9781101577219
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-03-27T07:00:00+00:00

Less “Cheap Patriotism,” More Deep Patriotism

We have gone through a period during which people waving American flags have done great damage to the country, to the people of Iraq, to America’s prestige in the world, to the national treasury, to the U.S. Constitution, and to the international rule of law. While force-feeding the country a brand of cheap and mindless patriotism, the “leaders” waving the biggest flags have steered the nation into a ditch. People of conscience should embrace Old Glory—and use the flag to help guide the public back in the direction of sanity.

One begins to fear that this accident was not very accidental. After all, GOP anti-tax operative Grover Norquist had declared openly: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.“1 That is not a patriotic statement.

We have an obligation to tell the ultraconservatives who are so rabidly antigovernment: “If you don’t love this government, then let it go and hand it over to people who do.” Those who would hijack the government and crash it with deficits pose a bigger threat than the terrorists.

And while we are at it, we could make do with a lot less knee-jerk antipatriotism from the left. I know it is hard to make peace with the country’s original sins of stolen land and stolen labor. It is hard to forgive its repeated entanglement in unjust wars, up to the present moment. However, the far left’s strategy of trying to fix the country by putting it down all the time has been an utter failure.

To paraphrase scholar Cornel West, you can’t save a country you don’t serve, and you can’t lead a country you don’t love. And there is much to love in this country. After all, we are talking about the nation that gave the world basketball, iPods, and Beyoncé Knowles. (If those three won’t get you up stomping and cheering for the red, white, and blue, I don’t know what will.)

The United States has the power to be a huge obstacle to planetary survival—or giant springboard to planetary salvation. A better America is the best gift that we can offer the world. Yet caring Americans will never give the world that gift if they are holding their noses and handling the flag like a used tissue.

If we do our work right, the United States will lead the world, again, someday. This next time—not in war. Not in per capita greenhouse-gas emissions. Not in incarceration rates. The United States will lead the world in green economic development, in world-saving technologies, in human rights. We will lead by showing a multiracial, multifaith, rainbow-colored planet how our multiracial, multifaith, rainbow-colored country pulled together to solve tough problems. The United States will go from being the world leader in ecological pollution to the world leader in ecological solutions.

Bruce Springsteen put it best in 2004 when he said: “America is not always right. That’s a fairy tale for children….

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