Thinking through patriotism
Patriotic sentiment is everywhere. But what does the explosion of expression since Sept. 11 mean?
Two professors, a high school teacher, and a college senior talked last week with the Monitor about flags, solidarity, and how issues of patriotism are playing out around them:
CHAU HUA, a senior majoring in English and economics at Tufts University in Medford, Mass.: I used to work across the street [from the World Trade Center], and I have a lot of good friends there who were affected by the attacks. The weekend after it happened I went down, and what I saw was an enormous display of solidarity and patriotism; people had flags on windows, on the homes, on their cars.... When I came back to Boston, I didn't feel that sense of solidarity. I was really disappointed.
JOHN PIERSON, an English teacher at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis: I think the fervor that was felt has certainly faded. My sense of our students is that
they have gone pretty much back to worrying about the things they might have been worrying about anyway.
James Fraser, professor of education and history and dean of the School of Education at Northeastern University, Boston: I saw two very distinct phases: The first was in the immediate aftermath. There was a lot of sense of patriotism; all that was a way of being in solidarity. I don't think I've sung "America the Beautiful" in 30 years, and I sang it multiple times. Once the bombing started in Afghanistan, there was a dramatic shift in what patriotism meant. In two [Northeastern] dorms facing each other, one has a large sign saying "War is not the answer," and in the facing window [there's] a sign, "War is the answer."
James Fraser: There has been a bit of a return to the idea that patriotism is in the hands of the people who support the government and who support the military action, and those of us who have real reservations about the government military action have gotten back into a more familiar discomfort with patriotism. It's not what it was before Sept. 11. There are more flags and more willingness to identify as patriotic Americans than I ever saw on a college campus since the beginning of the Vietnam War.
Carolyn Marvin, professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: The thing about patriotism is that it is ... bearing witness to the idea that the nation itself is a moral community, or that you belong to a moral community. For those people who think in this case that the nature of the moral obligation is that there should be fighting in Afghanistan, then something goes forward. But for those who think that the moral obligation might be different, there's not a lot to do ... at the moment. There always has to be the renewal of gestures and feelings....
James Fraser: What I'm seeing is this split around patriotism. That first week - I don't remember since before Vietnam that I felt so much solidarity as an American, and I got e-mails from several people from outside the country that were sort of condolences to me, as the symbolic American that they knew. With the war, I feel that has begun to change. For people who support the war, there's something to do: You can wave the flag, support the president. For those - and it's a large split in the Northeastern student body - who have real reservations about the military policy, what do we do? If we do service or wear a flag, are we endorsing something we don't want to be endorsing? It starts to get much murkier.... I don't want to go back to where I was in August, saying, patriotism is someone else's thing, they can have the flag, it's not mine. I think that what I'm reflecting in my uncertainty is something I perceive in others.
