The question was meant to be facetious, not insulting. But still, it caused me think about the issue – what it means “to hate” or “to love one’s country”.
It is an issue on which the elites who control our country – our elected politicians, as well as those who pay them to do their bidding – place a great deal of emphasis. More specifically, they use it to marginalize those who disagree with how our country is run.
These are the elites who refer to those who express opinions against the wars that they generate or support as “unpatriotic” or “treasonous”. They are the people who use the term “class warfare” to attack those who believe that the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes, commensurate with what their country does for them. They are those who use the epithet “socialist” to describe anyone who believes that government should play an active role in providing opportunities for the most vulnerable of our citizens. They coined the term “loony conspiracy theorist” to describe anyone who expresses serious disagreement with their own version of history. They wield the term “big government” to express their ideology that only private individuals and corporations are capable of making contributions to society, thereby advancing the argument that the government that governs least is the government that governs best. They use the term “bleeding heart liberal” to describe anyone who expresses empathy for the unfortunate.
There is a purpose behind all of this. Being at the top of the hierarchy, they wish more than anything to preserve the status quo at the least, or better yet to expand their own wealth and power. In the service of that goal they pronounce and propagate a world view that lauds the current power structure in our country. They do this in their attempt to justify the fact that they have many magnitudes more wealth and power than the rest of us. After all, who would accept having many magnitudes less wealth and power than other people unless a justification is provided? In other words, they propagate their justifications in order to keep the vast majority of American citizens content and quiet, and convince some of them even to put their lives on the line by going to war to support their various causes.
The elites of all nations do this to some degree – some more than others.
What does it mean to love one’s country?
I’ve said before that the question of “loving your country” is so abstract as to be almost meaningless. What does it mean? Does it mean loving the laws and policies on which your country is based? Does it mean loving your country’s leaders? Does it mean loving most or all of your country’s citizens? Does it mean loving the physical geography of your country?
It can mean any or all of those things, and more. In my own personal view, loving or hating your country means above all loving or hating what your country does. What your country does is determined largely by its leaders. But all of us deserve at least some part of the credit or blame because to varying degrees we all support or enable what our country does, or we take various measures to cause it to follow a different path.
I hate a great deal of what my country does. It does good things too, but like most Americans I believe that it is definitely going in the wrong direction. In this post I wish to note the things that I most hate about what my country does. It is important to me to do this because I believe that too many Americans are too complacent about these things. Too many of us are too hesitant to verbalize – even to ourselves – what it is that we dislike or hate about our country because we have been conditioned since childhood to be too hesitant to do this. We have been conditioned to believe that harsh criticism of our country is tantamount to lacking “patriotism” at best, or treason at worst. We have learned that those who express such views can be and often have been marginalized by society. So here’s my partial list:
Things I hate about my country
Imprisonment
The United States has by far the largest imprisonment rate of any nation in the world – 715 persons per 100,000 population in 2008. That amounts to more than two million imprisoned Americans.
You would think that this fact would give some pause to those who loudly proclaim the United States to be the “land of the free”. But it seems that most Americans either aren’t aware of this fact, or they are not very concerned about it – or both.
There are many reasons for our excessively large imprisonment rate – none of them good. In part it is racially driven, as suggested by many studies that show our justice system to be pervaded by racial bias. It is used to disenfranchise minorities, as was done in the 2000 presidential election in Florida, to hand the presidency to George W. Bush. It is facilitated by demagogic politicians who wish to enhance their image by appearing “tough on crime”. And it is fueled by the private prison industry, which spends millions to lobby our government for harsher and longer prison sentences in the interest of adding to their profits.
It is just plain shameful that our government hands off criminal justice responsibilities to private corporations who use the power given them in pursuit of their own private interests. Torture in our prisons is one of many tragic manifestations of that abrogation of responsibility. As one investigator explained:
You're not only seeing torture in action but, in the most extreme cases, you are witnessing young men dying. In one horrible scene, a naked man, passive and vacant, is seen being led out of his cell by prison guards. They strap him into a medieval-looking device called a 'restraint chair.' His hands and feet are shackled. There's a strap across his chest. His head rolls forward. He looks dead. He's not. Not yet." He's being punished for having a pillowcase on his head in his cell and refusing to remove it. Why? He has a long history of schizophrenia…
Imprisonment for victimless crimes is a prominent feature of our criminal justice system. It has been estimated that in the United States today, there are approximately 750 thousand individuals incarcerated for victimless crimes – mostly drug related. The presence of laws that allow for imprisonment for victimless crimes facilitates the introduction of racism into our criminal justice system. It contributes to organized crime. And it is a major reason for single parent households in our country.
Money in politics
Money is so freely used to influence elections in our country today that any reasonable assessment of American politics tells us that bribery is routinely used to buy and sell elections. So routine is it that it is actually built into our system and legalized. But that fact is never overtly spoken of. To do so would imply that our system of government is as much or more an aristocracy than it is a democracy.
The enabling of money to influence elections in our country makes a mockery of the presumed principle of one person-one vote. The money is used primarily to flood our nation with propaganda – in print and over the “public” airways – on behalf of the candidates who represent the rich and powerful. That propaganda represents a powerful force in our elections because it requires countering with counter messages from the other side – which lacks the money to do that. To the extent that money is thus enabled to influence our elections, democracy is corrupted or negated.
Rampant militarism
The United States is now virtually in a state of permanent war. It annually spends close to $700 billion on defense, almost as much as the rest of the world combined. It has been estimated that it now has more than 700 military bases scattered throughout the world.
During the latter half of the 20th Century the United States engaged in violent interventions against sovereign nations more than any other nation of the world, mostly on behalf of right wing dictators who promised to protect American interests. A partial list of illegal, immoral, or genocidal overseas military and other aggressive interventions in sovereign nations since 1893 includes: Hawaii (1893); Puerto Rico (1898); Cuba (1898-1903); the Philippines (1899-1902); Nicaragua (1909); Honduras (1912); Russia (1918-); Iran (1953); Vietnam (1954-73); South and Central America (1954-); Cuba (1961); Indonesia (1965); the Dominican Republic (1965); Cambodia (1970-75); Laos (1969-74); and East Timor (1975).
Most or all of the military or CIA interventions noted above were illegal as well as immoral. And there have been lots more. The mere fact of forceful intervention against a sovereign nation is what made them illegal and immoral. Beyond that, many or most of them were associated with additional crimes and/or atrocities.
U.S. leaders always have propaganda ready to justify those interventions that it can’t or doesn’t care to hide from the American people. That propaganda serves to placate too many U.S. citizens. But the rest of the world isn’t much fooled.
Tom Engelhardt, in his book “The American Way of War – How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s Wars”, provides an apt analogy for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its insistence that it has to maintain its presence there (albeit with “non-combat” troops) indefinitely to clean up the mess:
An uninvited guest breaks into a lousy dinner party, sweeps the already meager meal off the table, smashes the patched-together silverware, busts up the rickety furniture, and then insists on staying ad infinitum because the place is such a mess that someone responsible has to oversee the cleanup process.
What’s remained in all this, remarkably enough, is our confidence in ourselves, our admiration for us, our – well, why not say it? – our narcissism. Nothing we’ve done so far stops us from staring into that pool and being struck by what a kindly, helpful face stares back at us…
The U.S. contribution to global climate change
Climate change is threatening to destroy our planet. Brian Fagan describes the catastrophes that are likely to befall humanity if climate change is not adequately addressed, in his book “The Great Warming – Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilization”.
Today, we are experiencing sustained warming of a kind unknown since the Ice Age. And this warming is certain to bring drought – sustained drought and water shortages on a scale that will challenge even small cities… Imagine how many people might uproot themselves if the choice were between famine and food. Many believe the wars of coming centuries will not be fought over petty nationalisms, religion, or democratic principles, but over water, for this most precious of all our commodities may become even more valuable than oil. They are probably correct.
The U.S contribution to climate change is greatly out of proportion to its population. It is responsible for approximately one quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions. Yet, in 2001 President Bush pulled the United States out of its international commitment to the Kyoto protocol, leaving us and Australia as the only two industrialized countries uncommitted to the international effort to respond to the climate change threat.
President Obama has not been much better. At the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, the United committed to a 4% reduction in greenhouse gas emission from 1990 levels by 2020 – a puny and laughable gesture compared to the 80% reduction by 2050 that climate scientists say is necessary in order to avoid catastrophe.
Abrogation of international treaties
Just as a system of laws within nations is necessary to prevent the strong from crushing the vulnerable, and to maintain order with a minimum of violence, so is a system of laws necessary in international affairs – for very similar reasons. Following World War II the need for a strong system of international laws became widely apparent. The effort to establish such a system – The United Nations Organization – was successfully led by two U.S. presidents in succession, Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. Truman also played a lead role in the creation of the Nuremberg Tribunal of 1946, which led to the conviction of 16 Nazis for the war crimes which had recently resulted in monumental suffering and death.
I would have been quite proud of my country at the time for taking the lead role in these activities. But since that time the United States has done much to destroy the very system for the establishment of international peace that it had done so much to create, by failing on so many occasions to comply with that system. Its failure to comply has involved its many acts of military aggression directed at sovereign nations and more recently its widespread use of torture.
A great amount of evidence indicates that torture – a war crime – was widespread and condoned at the highest levels of the Bush administration, including George Bush and Dick Cheney themselves. Now Bush has even admitted to this crime in his recently released memoirs, and yet the reaction from our country has by and large been one of passive acceptance.
The Bush administration’s perpetration of war crimes was bad enough. Many Americans hoped that the Obama administration would aggressively pursue investigation followed by prosecution of those war crimes, as a means of sending a message to the international community of nations that it was serious about international law. Yet President Obama has steadfastly refused to have his Department of Justice investigate potential war crimes committed by high level personnel of the Bush administration.
Support of the International Criminal Court (ICC) would have been one of the best ways for our country to signal its support for international law. The purpose of the ICC is to prevent the most heinous of crimes that cannot or will not be addressed at the national level.
Though the Bush administration provided many excuses for its hostility to the ICC, the underlying issue appeared to be that it could not tolerate the possibility that an American could ever be tried before the Court. For example, Bush claimed that the Court’s jurisdiction could not extend to Americans because that would undermine “the independence and flexibility that America needs to defend our national interests around the world”. As Philippe Sands, a lawyer specializing in international law, suggests in his book “Lawless World”, such an excuse amounts to an assertion that U.S. leaders have no intention of adhering to the ICC’s prohibitions against some of the worst crimes imaginable. President Obama has done nothing to reverse that decision. I am deeply troubled by the fact that my country has done so much to destroy our system of international law by refusing to hold itself subject to so many international laws.
Inequality
The United States exhibits the greatest level of income inequality of any of the rich nations of the world. Consequently, as of 2007 a study showed that more than a third of the wealth in the United States was held by the top 1% of households, while about 15% was held by the lower 80%.
Income inequality in the United States plunged during the 1930s with the onset of FDR’s New Deal. It then remained quite low for several decades, until the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. It then began a precipitous climb, with a sharp decline beginning during the last year of Clinton’s Presidency, but then another sharp increase beginning at about the time that the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy first went into effect, so that by the end of 2006 we exceeded even the peak ratio of 1929 that preceded the Great Depression.
Epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett demonstrate in their book, “The Spirit Level – Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger”, numerous non-economic consequences of obscene income inequality that are independent of absolute income or wealth. These consequences include more mental illness, greater use of illegal drugs, higher imprisonment rate, higher infant mortality rate, more homicides, lower educational performance of our children, lower index of child well-being, lower trust in our fellow citizens, and lower status of women, among other adverse societal effects.
A nation’s level of income and wealth inequality is largely a product of its laws and policies. A high level of national income and wealth inequality generally means that its elites have been successful in arranging its laws and policies to enhance their own wealth and power at the expense of everyone else.
In conclusion
I really do hate all of the things I discussed above. None of these are things that just happened accidentally. They are all mainly the result of a relatively small elite in our country who have fought hard to elevate their own individual wealth, status, and power way above that of the vast majority of Americans.
Thus, in the quest for private profit our elites buy politicians to pass legislation to consistently favor the few over the many. They lead us into one war after another, always with some justification, which often lacks even a semblance of sincerity. They proclaim that the international laws aimed at producing world peace don’t apply to the United States because we are too special to be constrained by such laws. They develop a criminal justice system in which record portions of our population are sent to prison for no good reason, while proclaiming our country to be the “land of the free”. Our democracy is greatly corrupted when their wealth is used to sway elections and to buy politicians who are pledged to conduct our nation’s business in their own interests rather than in the interests of the voters who elected them. And giant corporations spend millions of dollars on propaganda to deny the climate change that threatens world-wide catastrophe for billions of people – in the interest of enhancing their profits.
I hate that my country has done all these things and continues to do them. And I hate that the political party that I have belonged to for many decades is unable or unwilling to even acknowledge most of these problems, let alone make substantial inroads into solving them.
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