In a 2020 essay published just before the last presidential election, novelist Marilynne Robinson asked the question: “What does it mean to love a country?” That is the question facing us again with two weeks left in the election that will determine this country’s course for the rest of our lives — and our children’s and grandchildren’s lives.
What does it mean to love our country?
Robinson describes the feeling as “a deep, if sometimes difficult, affinity I would call love.”
A deep, if sometimes difficult, affinity.
Do you love your country if you always criticize it? Do you love it if you never criticize it? President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country,” which is too one-sided. We should ask what our country can do for us — especially when it isn’t doing enough for those who don’t have enough. But the second half also applies.
Not enough of us ask what we can do for our country.
I would change Kennedy’s admonition to, “Ask what your country can do for you, then ask what you can do for your country.”
That is my baseline for loving our country.
Robinson says it is also “a feeling like a love of family.” America is a glorious idea, expressed in glorious language in our founding documents, she writes, which profess that “human beings are sacred, therefore equal. We are asked to see one another in the light of a singular inalienable worth that would make a family of us if we let it.”
If we let it, but too often we don’t. Our founding words, Robinson adds, “always leave us wanting” because our sense of “family” is too limited. We have an inner circle to whom we generously extend our blessings — relatives, friends and maybe our local community. But there is also an outer circle where, for too many Americans, generosity becomes conditional, and those who fall outside those immediate boundaries are neglected or rejected, sometimes unwittingly, or in the case of Trump and his anti-immigrant supporters, willfully.
Equality, our founding principle, Robinson says, “is a progressive force, constantly and necessarily exposing our failures and showing us new paths forward” — if we have the courage, and enough love, to take those paths.
What does it mean to love our country at this most critical time?
It can mean writing postcards, like Oak Parker Jeanette Mancusi, who has personally penned over 4,000 to people in swing states, urging them to vote because “Our rights are on the ballot Nov. 5.” Jeanette is a member of the Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist congregation, which has partnered with the Center for Common Ground, a non-partisan, Black and women-led voting rights organization founded in 2018. Staff and volunteers work in voter-suppression states where more than 20% are voters of color. The Unity Temple Democracy in Action/Vote Love team focused their postcard writing in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina, reminding recipients that their vote is their voice and that every vote matters.
It means knocking on doors, like the Democratic Party of Oak Park’s dedicated corps of volunteers, who have been carpooling each weekend to Michigan (Saturdays) and Wisconsin (Sundays) to talk to residents, face to face, in those critical swing states, because personal contact is still the most effective way to get the word out. They will be doing it again this weekend (dpop.us).
Loving our country means voting, of course, but there are times when loving our country demands something more: for Republicans, it means voting against the party you have always voted for and finding the courage to vote for the other party. It means rising above party loyalty and ideology to come to the aid of your country because your party’s candidate is morally and mentally unfit to be president and will harm our country if elected. As Hippocrates said so long ago, “First, do no harm.”
Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate. It’s indifference.” Voting means caring enough about our country to make the strongest possible statement, not relying on fellow citizens to make that statement for you just because you “live in a Blue state.” You can’t love your country and not vote (or throw away your vote on a third party candidate), especially in this election when so much is at stake.
It means voting even if you have to go outside your comfort zone to do it — for the sake of the country to which you pledge allegiance.
If you don’t love your country enough to help save it, then what are you?
Democracy places just one demand on us. It leaves its very existence entirely in our hands. It asks if we’ve got what it takes to keep this precious gift of self-government alive, and if we don’t, it dies in our hands without a whimper.
Marilynne Robinson put it differently.
“Democracy,” her essay concludes, “is the great instrument of human advancement.
“We have no right to fail it.”