"Patriot's Day"

It's 9/11. My Facebook feed is awash in patriotic sentiment - where people were when the planes came, when the towers went down. On some level, I understand that this is still a sense of processing, the need to relate a tragic event to your own life, a community engaging of sorrow and healing. Hell, I've done it in years past too (my daughter's due date was 9/11/01 but, as is her standard now, she was stubborn and came late).

Over the past few years, though, it's become more hollow and increasingly apparent to me what's really happening...

Blind patriotism is dangerous. We're all being conned.

Maybe I say that because I can not remember a time in my life when I've felt "proud" of being an American. I've never been inspired to wave a giant American flag or cry during the National Anthem. I don't view Fourth of July as anything more than a giant red, white and blue orgasm of fireworks, hot dogs and beer.

But don't try to feed me that "freedom isn't free" bullshit. I've been a military wife, have watched friends be lowered into the ground in service of a country that did not give a fuck about them, and been able to do nothing but cry and scream internally when they fired off the 21 gun salute. I raised my daughter alone for the first few years of her life while her father was in Afghanistan, Iraq... being shot at and killing people because he was told to do so.

But let's start from the beginning.

Many of our ancestors fled England due to religious persecution, poverty and indentured servitude. Think about that for a second.

They sailed over here in boats, full of hope and enthusiasm, proceeded to slaughter nearly an entire indigenous population and then become the very thing they were escaping from. Since then? We still persecute people who practice religion differently than what the "norm" is (or, god forbid, not at all *gasp*). The poverty level is not only obscene, but people are being judged, scolded and harassed for seeking any sort of help. We've relegated Native Americans to reservations with terrible education, alcohol problems and sexual assault (and set dogs on them when they protest the desecration of their burial lands and water sources). And slavery? Well, our ancestors must have forgotten about wanting to escape from that pretty quickly.

And we make today Patriot's Day? Fuck that. What is patriotic about today? We've become everything we hate, everything we try to bomb out of other countries. Sure, we may have more "freedom" then some of them, but do we really? We tell other countries what they're doing wrong and hold ourselves up to the world as some sort of golden standard... but totally ignore everything that needs fixing (and not just ignore...actively defend or deny).

We publicly abhor how other countries handle women's rights and sexual abuse, but we give rapists less than 3 months in jail and spend a ridiculous amount of time and energy trying to take legal rights away from women and continually attempt to defund Planned Parenthood.

We hate Muslims, but let our Christians quietly become the KKK and say nothing (I'm not even going to begin to go into Donald Trump's rise to candidacy fame).

We wring our hands about North Korea and how unacceptable it is there, but then threaten to kill people who don't stand for the National Anthem.

We don't have segregated drinking fountains any more but we still are quick to call POC liars, niggers and drama queens when they point out how they're still being singled out.

If you ask the internet, the white man is the most oppressed group in the entire United States.

I call bullshit on all of that. I can't watch one more video of someone leaping out of the Trade Towers and somehow be asked to translate that into patriotism. True patriotism is helping to make this country greater, calling out its flaws and helping to fix them.

What we're constantly being asked to do isn't patriotism, it's nationalism. It's dangerous and I worry we're just now starting to see the turn the country has taken into terrifying territory.

2016.

It's here... a bright, shiny new year. A clean slate. A blank page.

But, is it really?

As human beings, we're always searching for finish lines and starting gates. The race, the real work of the thing, gets lost in concept.

I'm just as guilty as the next person.

This year, I want to finally get healthy. I want to write more. I want to paint more. I want, I want, I want.

But who am I already?

At my core, I'm a deeply imperfect person. I don't say that with any disdain. I love my life, my imperfections. Right now, I'm sitting on the couch, writing this, watching a movie and drinking a glass of red wine. There are many things I could and probably should be doing... my kitchen is a mess, my laundry needs done... but I'm focused on (and possibly hyperfocused - it has recently come to my attention that hyperfocus is a symptom of attention deficit disorder which I have been vehemently ignoring that I have for years) what I want to do.

At some point, all this arbitrary bullshit that we continually pile onto ourselves in an attempt to "become a better person" just ends up being too much, right? Work out, eat right, travel more, spend more time with family, with friends, with ourselves... when do we just embrace our genuine humanness and stop becoming a list of shit we should be doing?