Don't Love America (There's a Reason)

Before I start, instead of asking that you just hear me out with an open mind, I merely beg you not to shoot me or throw things at me (but if you must, please choose the latter option).

Life is good, as is love. The sun, beautiful, warm and life-sustaining, is good. The light that comes out of the lamp beside me is good. America, however, is not good.

Goodness is a property that comes from something intrinsically noble and lovely. Life, love, happiness, and justice do not appeal to any higher authority to validate their goodness. They are in and of themselves good.

But a nation? Why on earth would we ascribe it such a label? It's easy to see why, actually. This nation has done some pretty impressive things. A founding document centered on the ideal of inalienable rights is pretty impressive. And who could forget that awesomely epic revolution we fought against a tyrannical Britain?

But it's still absolutely crucial that we don't misunderstand that history to believe that America is somehow good. Here's why.

Many of the things that America has done are good, and we ought rightly to be proud of those virtuous fragments of our heritage. We can rightly take pride in what our country has done right, but the moment we assume that rightness to rub off on the nation itself (which is nothing more than a landmass plus a government) we lose sight of the dark times in our past. We put on shades that bias our view of the past, present, and future.

In other words, it's not only absurdly false, but dangerous. When you view a country in and of itself as inherently noble, you look favorably upon its past transgressions, no matter how grievous. After our treatment of Native Americans in the nineteenth century, both sides' war crimes during the civil war, our terrible discrimination against the Chinese in the industrial revolution, and our mistreatment of blacks throughout the twentieth century, America has serious blood on its hands. I don't hate America for that, but I recognize that those evils happened. When you put on these rose-tinted glasses and look at the past with an "America is beautiful" frame of mind, you will try to scrub those transgressions away. You will rationalize them, try to ignore them, be discomforted by them, repress them, and irrationally deride anyone who acknowledges America's past sins. Your reactionary vitriol will be unappeasable—you'll call the truth-teller an unpatriotic, America-hating liberal before he even has time to blink.

But your view of the past won't matter nearly as much as your view of the present, which is shaped and colored by your view of the past. You won't think twice about the possibility that we may be wrong in any given war or conflict; whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or the war on drugs, America automatically gets the moral free pass. You'll implicitly care more about the lives of U.S. citizens than you will about the lives of foreigners, as if there was some difference in the inherent value of each human life. You'll ignore the hardships that our trade and immigration policies inflict upon the rest of the world, only focusing on how to line American wallets and alleviate American cultural discomforts. You'll close your ears to any possibility of a wrong deed on America's part.

You will, inch by inch, become blind to injustice.

This nationalistically induced blindness lies at the root of much of the world's present and past hardship. The Germans allowed the Nazi atrocity to march forward in one of the most terrible onslaughts of evil in human history, precisely because they believed in their country. The Confederate States of America was largely motivated not only by racism and greed, but the southern nationalistic view that they had to keep pure their southern way of living. Why? Because the "south" was inherently good.

To love one's country is only the collective, political extension of very human sins—pride and self-centeredness. Why should a corrupt, sinful human not extend his pride and egoism to his country? And it is also pervasive into the will and emotions. We feel uncomfortable, at first, detaching ourselves from something we so dearly cherish. It hurts to lay down our pride of the nation, just as much as of the self. But it must be done.

History tells tales of tragedy when this lesson is ignored, and our current political, diplomatic, and economic policies are largely contingent upon the degree to which we can abandon nationalism, and view all humans of all nations as equal. If we cannot get this mindset straightened out, I fear that we have a future awaiting us full of more needless suffering… only because, as a nation, we wanted to feel absolutely great.

It needn't be so.