Entries from April 2005 ↓

There have been a million encomiums to Pope John Paul II since his death. As a non-Catholic, non-Christian, sort-of-Jew, I’ve been thinking about him and trying to figure out why this pope’s passing caused me some sorrow. It certainly was not for his views on homosexuality, or contraception, or abortion. It seems to me that the tides of history will eventually erode the Church’s resistance to those changes and John Paul II’s adherence to those dated doctrine’s will be forgotten. What he will be remembered for, I believe, is the part he played in the dissolution of the Iron Curtain. And that’s what I think about when I think about him.

I was in a union for a couple of years in the late 80s: the only time I’ve ever been in a union. It was the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City Teacher’s Union, an affiliate of the NEA. It was a pretty good time to be in the teacher’s union, since they had just succeeded in securing significant raises for the teachers. In 1985, only a few years before I started teaching, the starting salary for a provisional teacher (one like me who didn’t yet have a Master’s degree) was in the $14,000 range. (That’s equivalent to about $25,000 today*) By the time I started in 1987, starting salary was $23,000 ($40,000 in today’s money.)

But the union wasn’t just about better salaries. The union had a bigger goal: the improvement of the horribly broken New York City school system. The mission of the union, which it always seemed to take pretty seriously while I was there, recognizes that

It felt good to be part of something big like that. My goals of helping kids in some of the poorest, most crime-ridden parts of the nation to learn so that they could take part in all that our society had to offer meshed well with the organization I was a part of.

And, an ocean away, another union was acting on a much grander scale to secure more than just better wages for its people. Solidarity was changing the world. With his ties to Poland, John Paul II encouraged the people of his home country to seek freedom and democracy. His visits to Poland were some of the largest crowds he ever drew, and with his support and the sacrifices of millions of Poles, my students and I were able to watch the tumbling of the dominoes and the beginning of the end of the corrupt Soviet empire.

It was a great experience for my kids, and the brighter ones quickly tied it in to their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in the Civil Rights movement. It was a cool moment in my teaching career when one of the kids, who had previously written about the murders she’d seen in her neighborhood, wrote a piece where she discussed Pope John Paul II and Martin Luther King Jr, and concluded by saying, “Sometimes religion can do good things.” Indeed.

[UPDATED 4/21: Minor spelling corrections, title change to the correct title.]

Got into a discussion with someone at work today about patriotism. I had as my MSN IM picture the George W. Bush/Alfred E. Neuman image from the Nation magazine. He said it was offensive to him and not appropriate when we are at war. I didn’t have to ask him to repeat the idiotic statement because there it was, displayed on my computer screen, in black and white.

“Why is it not appropriate?” I typed. “Because patriotism demands that you support our troops and our government.”

I often forget that people who are smart and talented in many ways can be such fucking idiots when it comes to the meaning of patriotism. Patriotism is defined very simply as “Love of and devotion to one’s country.” Notice: it says “country” not “government”. I love my country. I love the ideals it stands for. I love the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address and the I Have a Dream speech. I love the busy, dirty, congestion of New York City. I love the bitter, empty, loneliness of Eastern Montana. I love the perpetual, gloomy, dampness of Seattle. I love the heat and humidity of Florida in August. (All right… I hate heat and humidity, but I’m making a point.) I love the independent spirit of the people and the way we come together as community when we need to. I love the ingenuity that took us to the moon and invented the Internet and Post-It notes. I love that I can walk through nearly any big city and find restaurants featuring food and people from all over the globe.

And because I love all these aspects of my country, I despise my government. The leadership we have now — which I committed so much time and energy and money over the past couple of years to defeating — is seeking to destroy those truths which we hold self-evident. They print money and spend it against no tomorrow. They start wars for specious reasons and lie and block and bully the people from pursuing the truth. They have taken the maxim of “What’s good for [insert company name here], is good for the country” to such extremes that it is uncertain whether there is a meaningful difference anymore between government and business.They raise the Second Amendment to the level of the Ten Commandments, but chip away at the First Amendment — which is First not by coincidence — until we have to watch what we say lest we offend the theocracy and pay hefty fines to the FCC.

The thing is, though, the strength of these feelings surprise me and scare me a little. While my politics are pretty far to the left of the spectrum, I think these feelings of disgust with my government — and it is still my government — are probably not that far off from the feelings of a guy, who, ten years ago today, blew up the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. He hated the government, too, while he loved a certain conception of this country. A conception, like mine, which sees patriotism as something separate from government. It scares me to think that I have anythng in common with someone who could forget that the country is the people and — despite Joseph Stalin’s maxim of “no man; no problem” – killing the people who make up the country does nothing to demolish the government.

Interestingly enough, today happens to be Patriot’s Day – not to be confused with Patriot Day, another one of Bush’s methods of appropriating our grief over 9/11 for his political ends. The holiday is celebrated in Massachusetts and Maine, commemorating the Battle of Lexington and Concord 230 years ago. You American readers remember from elementary school, don’t you: Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride, Longfellow and “one if by land, two if by sea”, Emerson and “the shot heard ’round the world”? Nearly 50 Americans died that night, setting off the 6-year war which led to the founding of this country. Samuel Adams and John Hancock spoke out against their government –the British government — which considered them traitors and sought to arrest them, leading to the march on their supposed hiding place. The thousands of men who left their homes that night to take up their arms against the greatest army in the world were patriots, putting their lives at risk defending an idea of freedom from government. My idiot colleague who wears a pin in his lapel and seeks to shut my mouth is just a brainwashed fool.