I woke up with the taste of bile in my throat.  My dreams were full of me choking and hacking, vomiting repeatedly.  I was back in my parents’ house for a big family gathering.  Smiling and done up business casual I excused myself repeatedly for emetic purposes.  No one really noticed or cared.  Parties like that are just collections of uncomfortable people waiting it out.  I could traipse through the living room dressed as Dr. Frank N. Furter and the most reaction would be nervous giggles with an occasional, “Oh my!”  What’s worse, almost no one would get the reference. 

Today is a holiday, so I’m told.  Everyone in the neighborhood exchanges salutations of “Happy 4th” and the like.  It seems odd to me.  The contrast between Memphis and Seattle has never been so stark.  There’s a commitment to patriotism in the PNW I haven’t seen in the South since the 90s.  A blind loyalty to us all being ‘merican just because we live here.  Pressed to the point I have to admit I don’t think of the 4th as a real holiday.  I put it alongside Valentine’s Day and Easter as made-up reasons to celebrate something.

I believe the fight for independence in this country goes so much deeper than cessation of our governing body from a different governing body.  The liberation remembered for this date is metaphorical at this point.  Celebrating the religious patriarchy that founded our now dysfunctional government is like celebrating thalidomide for pioneering advances in prosthetics.  The cold, clammy hands of oligarchy have choked the purest freedom out of the nation.

I mean, we celebrate with flags and explosives timed in sequence to the same dozen patriotic hymns in our short national litany.  The whole ritual is archaic, if you ask me.  These days I feel like patriotism should be expressed with bikinis and booze.  Americans might not agree on a lot but we all seem to get behind bodies in bikinis and/or alcohol.  Except the Mormons.  They will probably lay claim to the middle states when the disintegration begins.  A desert culture, founded in resource management and laziness.  What I mean to say is, the United States is a much bigger place than they’d have you believe.  Patriotism is relative here.

I remember the first time I stopped feeling like an American.  If was shortly after September 9th, 2001.  I worked at a small vet clinic run by Methodists.  Nice enough folk.  They didn’t care about my lack of religion as long as I didn’t bring it up.  In Memphis around 2000, that meager tolerance was better than the other prominent flavors of Christ’s body.  I kept my head down and worked hard when I could.  I love animals so vet tech was a natural fit for me.  The morning of 9/11 I was cleaning kennels in the back.  One of the veterinarians came in with his portable TV from home and called us to the front.  Around 7am I was huddled with half a dozen people around a stainless steel procedure table watching the attack on a tiny black & white screen.

I remember feeling sick.  I remember a communal disbelief punctuated with grief.  Shortly after the first plane hit, I went back to work.  I didn’t want to watch.  There was no new information and the news reporters were speculating in many different directions.  The hatred hadn’t taken root yet.  We were just casting out for some explanation.  I think the entire nation wanted it to be an aberration.  Some crazy person.  When the second plane hit the second building, that’s when I knew this was planned.

That day, all of our reactions were important.  That was the last time we, as a country, all shared the same opinion simultaneously.  In the days following, American patriotism buzzed through media like a motif.  The nice people I worked with all developed a vicious sense of revenge, fueled by patriotism.  The level of gossip about whether someone displayed a flag on their person/possessions was vicious.  Any sliver of sympathy for another nationality was tantamount to treason.

As an intelligent 19-year old that not only studied American history but also watched PBS, I had some rational thoughts about why another country might hate us blindly.  I have never once said that anyone deserves senseless violence.  I’m a pacifist the way some people are Baptist.  That part of me has never wavered.  I know violence exists but there is no chance I will ever condone killing.  It’s innate to my nature.  Death is inevitable but we are not the reapers.  We gave up the right to slaughter our prey when supermarkets succeeded.

Anyway.  All I’m saying is blind patriotism is as bad as blind faith.  Know what you’re supporting before you say yes.  Or at least have enough sense to know you don’t know.