Why I'm Not A Patriot

TW: Slavery, rape, sexual assault, hate crimes, nationalism, online harassment

Before I start this post, I apologize if the last one I made and subsequently deleted was offensive. I was probably writing way too early in the morning and wasn't really thinking about what I was saying. I'll probably write what I was trying to say in a better and less hurtful manner in the future.

Anyway. Onwards.
This post probably doesn't apply unless you live in America. I do and I'm just ranting about some people's attitudes towards "democracy."

"America stands for democracy! Justice! Liberty!"

I'm so tired of hearing people spout nonstop patriotism and statements like that. Liberty and Justice with Capital Letters aren't "American." They're concepts. Unrealistic ideals that America claims to uphold. Except it's not America claiming anything-- it's a country.

The idea the founding fathers were some bastion of Freedom is... just wrong. Yeah, there was religious freedom and freedom of speech. Mostly. For some people.

But they were slave owners. They were slave owners. I have to repeat that to get it to sink in because when espousing the virtues of slave owners and rapists. Yeah.

America isn't associated with Liberty and Justice except in our own collective imagination. 'Patriotism' is often just a nice way of saying nationalism. Why did people vote for Trump? He was talking about taking 'our' country back, but he never said who 'we' included.

 America isn't a country for people of color. It's not a country for immigrants. Unless those immigrants are white and European, whose intent is to colonize a land that was already inhabited. It's not a country for disabled and neurodivergent people. It's not a country for LGBT folk. It's not a country for women and especially not a country for people who are multiple of those things at once. Etc.

Only some people deserve freedom, apparently. 'Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses' or whatever the exact wording of that is. It's an ideal. You can't go on AND on and on and on about the ideal of 'hope.' Just define the ideal and talk about how someone can actually help.

We shouldn't fight to be included in the idea of America. We should be fighting to remove the idea of 'a great America.' Don't make the country great 'again.' Make the idea of a country only mean who makes the laws in what area.

Justice is a lie. Who gets justice when people are bleeding from hate crimes? Not the victims. Justice is for people who can write speeches and who can pay the richest lawyers.

Freedom of speech only applies if you're speaking up against meanie liberals, don't you know? It doesn't mean anything if you tell someone they're being a jerk. Telling someone they're racist is worse than calling them the n word, clearly.

Yeah, there's an issue of free speech.

It's an issue when someone starts a kickstarter for an innocent video series and is spammed death threats. It's an issue when that person who's being spammed death threats is 'censoring' others.

Like that even means anything to them. Like a video series on YouTube is somehow equivalent to people getting murdered for speaking up against a dictatorial regime.

They can't stop using the struggles of LGBT people across the globe as an excuse for racism and Islamophobia. Those people don't even care about us. They just care about any reason to be cruel.

Aren't minorities human too? Don't we deserve justice and freedom? The 'American' dream? It was never meant for us.

If you make a single mistake, if you show that you're human? You don't deserve justice for all the wrongs people have done you. Apparently to be American, to be patriotic, you have to be white, cishet, able bodied, male-- did I mention white yet?

Let's forget about slavery. Let's forget about the Japanese internment camps. Let's forget about the mass genocide and rape of indigenous tribes. Let's forget about the parts of history that don't sound like the uphold Justice Democracy and Freedom. Let's forget about the times the government has sloppily tried to force a leader onto other people.

Let's forget about all that. America means something greater than all of that! Obviously.

And THIS here is sarcasm because America means nothing. If you go back in time a thousand years and tell someone 'America,' they'll have no idea what you mean. Because America independent of the sociopolitical implications that give it meaning is NOTHING.

I'm not a patriot because America means nothing. Maybe you fight for social justice because of some ideal that you apply to 'our' country. And that's fine. But I'll fight for it because I want to protect the people that coincidentally live here. Or don't live here and want to because we're relatively safer than where they live right now.