I love America, although I don’t consider myself particularly patriotic. When I watched those planes crash into the World Trade Center, a thousand sickening feelings went through my body. However, any idea that the attacks were somehow an assault on my national identity didn’t occur to me until someone on the news told me so.
Maybe a natural human response to tragedy is to try immediately to make sense of it. News anchors began using words that have deep cultural meaning. They tossed around words like “horrific,” “tragic” and “senseless” as if we all hadn’t watched those planes crash before every commercial break, as if we needed their words to tell us what we were feeling, as if the word “senseless” somehow made thousands of deaths make some sense.
More important to my life, however, is the way our government and media use nationalistic language that is explicitly inclusive while implicitly excluding millions of Americans from that vision.
Attorney General John Ashcroft told Americans that it was their “civic duty” to donate blood, but tens of millions of American citizens cannot donate blood. Millions of gay men are excluded because of outdated and bigoted restrictions: A man who has had protected sex with another man, even once, since 1977 can never donate blood again. In contrast, a hospital worker who has come into contact with HIV-infected blood cannot donate for 12 months.
I am as positive as it is possible to be that I am HIV-negative, which is more than I can say for the vast majority of my straight friends, and yet I’m not allowed to donate blood. I and millions in similar situations cannot legally perform our “civic duty.” Am I less of an American citizen than John Ashcroft? The answer appears to be yes.
In a similar situation, George W. Bush got on TV and immediately began invoking the name of God on behalf of Americans. The fact that Bush believes in God is great. I’m thrilled. Religion is probably a very useful way of dealing with grief and tragedy. I’m all about religion. But once the name of God becomes involved in the national identity of Americans, which it irrevocably does when the president uses it in the manner he did, millions of agnostic or atheist Americans are instantly excluded from that national identity. Millions of Americans are instantly “less American” than their God-fearing neighbors. Millions of Americans are suddenly excluded even as “America unites.”
Similar feelings rise up in me when I think about the response of America to Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Last week, they both agreed that America was to blame for terrorism. American support for gays, lesbians, abortion and the ACLU led to God deserting us, they said. Implicitly, America had the attacks coming.
The country reacted with rage. How dare they say such things at a time like this?
Not only is it depressing that these two fools generate any press at all; it is equally distressing that they had to offend every American before Americans noticed their hatred.
Pat Robertson has previously said the deaths of thousands of sinners may be justifiable if it prevents them and the children they would have from going to hell. Better 1,000 Palestinians in hell than those 1,000 and their 5,000 future children, he argued.
Jerry Falwell has said, “AIDS is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals,” and “[AIDS] is God’s punishment on a society that tolerates homosexuals.”
In the world, more people are dying of AIDS right now than would die if a World Trade Center-style collapse happened every day for the next year.
I’m sad that Robertson and Falwell draw attention at all, but more sad that their hate directed at gays, lesbians and ethnic groups hasn’t gained as much outrage as their words against America.
Many Americans of Asian or Middle-Eastern descent have to deal with the fear that they will be targeted for their ethnicity. That alone keeps them from feeling wholly American.
Most Americans take for granted their positions of privilege. They don’t wake up everyday and question their national identity. Most straight people don’t wake up everyday and remind themselves they are straight. Most white people don’t have to remind themselves that they are white. Most white, straight, God-fearing, blood-donating Americans don’t have to remind themselves that they are American.
The rest of us do. That hardly seems like the best way to keep America united.
