I was five when Ronald Reagan was elected. My parents wouldn't let me stay up to watch the election results, but they promised they would wake me when the final count came in. True to their word, they came into my room around midnight with the news, "Lizzie! We have a new president!" I burst into tears. "But I was voting for Carter!" I wailed. My father turned very red and growled at my mother, "I blame you for this."
But the beginning of my precocious political consciousness was soon drowned out by the 80's. A lot of things got drowned out by the 80's. They were loud. Some people started making an assload of money, we got the Olympics, Bruce Springsteen was singing "Born in the USA," and I fell for this cultural myth of prosperity hook, line, and sinker.
It didn't matter that we had just lost a house, or that my parents couldn't always keep the utilities turned on. I believed the 1984 version of my life. I don't mean the Orwellian version of 1984. I mean the Brat Pack version. I mean the Mary Lou Retton version. I believed that we were all experiencing unprecedented prosperity, regardless of the fact that half my town was out of work when Chrysler pulled the plug at the AMC plant. I believed in my heart that the U.S. was the only country in the world that mattered, because that year, it looked to be true.
The Los Angeles Olympic Games made me a patriot. I wore red white and blue all summer. I told everyone I met that I was going to run the 400m dash in the Olympics someday. I hated the Russians. They were bad. Why? They had nukes. So did we, but that was beside the point. I hated the East Germans, because everyone knew they used steroids. So did we, but that was beside the point. Blinded by red white and blue, I was incapable of seeing the rust on our glossy permacoat. I was satisfied with my freedom to see Molly Ringwald movies. "Can you believe the East Germans aren't even allowed to watch movies?" was the extent of my political understanding.
Then the Berlin Wall came down. This was a huge flag-waving moment for the U.S. We had won the Cold War! Yay rah, us! The end of the Cold War coincided with the return of my critical thinking skills. I don't know if it was the sudden transparency of the once-mysterious socialist bloc that allowed me to see past the Coca-Cola version of the world, or if it was my own brain development kicking in right on schedule, but that happy moment in world history made me a cynic. One of my first thoughts while watching people stream from East to West was, "Well, now what? All the state-employed East Germans are out of work. What's Mr. Gorbechev gonna do about that?" Patriotism changed for me when the Wall came down.
Suddenly, I could see. My own parents were out of work. We had no heat. We were starving in the richest country in the world. Molly Ringwald was making a ton of money, just for being cute. I was freaking adorable! Where was my paycheck? My Olympic heroes began confessing to steroid use. The rust spots grew bigger every year straight on through to adulthood. But the 80's were not an era of social justice. No one in my life taught me how to work for change, because the U.S. did not believe it needed to change.
I now believe that true patriots question their government and hold them accountable for their actions. True patriots do whatever they can to better their communities. They want the U.S. to be better than it is. They don't care what we did in World War II; they want to know what we're doing today. Patriots don't wave flags or light fireworks. They look for news from sources outside the U.S. True patriots do not have red white and blue ribbon magnets on their cars. And above all, they do not allow the U.S. to rest on its laurels or on its ass.
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