Patriots Outside the Box: Life Beyond the Bush

2 July 2002

by D.D. Delaney, Port Folio Weekly

A patriot, says Webster's Dictionary, is "one who loves his country and zealously supports its authority and interests." But there's room for interpretation in that formula, depending on how "country" is defined. Is it the land? The government? The institutions? Does it refer to the present? The past? Or the future, as you imagine it could or should be?

Under-defined as it is, though, in most of us "country" arouses associations of deep emotional impact. It resonates with home and all things intimately loved. It's where we live and where we vow to take a stand.

A tricky concept, especially this July 4 in a political year when there's stiff social pressure to prove our patriotism by standing as one in the Terror War. Expect to hear a lot about that between now and the November elections, as partisan patriots wiggle through and around that descriptive but troublesome word, "zealously."

One point seems clear, though. Since Sept. 11 the federal government, in the name of a country centered in the person of George W. Bush and his administration, has seized the authority and defined the interests it expects all of us to zealously support. To do otherwise now casts doubt on our patriotism, with a range of unpleasant consequences possible.

But what if the country Bush loves with all his heart is not the same homeland calling to you or me?

In my own background in a socially liberal, Unitarian household, I was taught to work out my own authentic philosophy of life, accepting no substitutes. Inevitably, a certain number of hot-button family opinions came with the mission. For example, family members would not have been pleased if I'd gone to work for the Christian Coalition.

But patriotism, in the Bush sense -- zealous support for the federal government's authority and interests -- was never part of my family's values. One the other hand, I was taught to respect many of the values of the founding fathers. I was taught that loyalty to those national values is patriotic.

That's the position Steve Burmon takes. At 57, the Beach resident is beginning a third career he's been preparing for all his life -- as a teacher and lecturer on America's true meaning and destiny.

"I'm not really a political person," he says. "But there's another perspective" involving the "original spiritual intentions of the founding fathers" which he believes are undermined in our present two-party government and its central executive authority, "taking booty in cycles."

That system, rising in strength in the aftermath of the Civil War, has institutionalized "all forms of tyranny against the central position of conscience." Yet Burmon believes the country's founders placed individual conscience at the center of all social discourse. The key American idea, he says, is "to form a more perfect union," not through executive order but through a collective process of discussion and debate where each citizen has input informed by a carefully examined conscience.

Burmon considers himself patriotic in his loyalty to that original American thinking. It was first revealed to him in the writings of Virginian John Randolph Tucker, a late-nineteenth-century state legislator and law professor at Washington and Lee University. Tucker's arguments convinced him that the founders intended "to bring divine law into human law in a way that is free and not religious." Nowhere was this intention clearer than in Virginia.

In May, 1776, Burmon learned, the Virginia House of Burgesses adopted its own Declaration of Independence, different from Jefferson's July 4 Declaration in two important ways. "It declared the divine right of kings null and void," replacing it with "the divine right of the human being." And it "makes clear that the source of (human) authority is the 'Searcher of Hearts,'" a universal inner presence which is "the power of conscience."

Burmon's America "is actually a new culture. We're not about being a super-power. Our real aim is to become a society fair and open, which allows for the God-given gifts everybody has to bring to the service of everybody, not just the nation but the whole world." It is a culture that has never yet been realized, more of the future than of the past.

Advocating that culture has engaged Burmon's patriotic zeal. "Somewhere in my biography," he says, "what it means to be an American is a question that's always been there."

Beginning in the 1970's, that question began to demand an answer. He was an Air Force Academy graduate then, serving as a high-ranking officer in the European command. His duties are still classified, but, he says, "I had an experience where I saw I was not competent to take on the responsibility of high command. I didn't know enough about myself as a person." Seven years into his commission, he resigned. "I had to go about life by trial and error. It was the most courageous thing I ever did."

After completing a master's degree in 1984, he went to work in an intentional community for the disabled in Camp Hill, PA, where he experienced another personal crisis.

"I realized I was unconsciously disrespectful of the handicapped," he says. At the same time a long-standing lower-back pain he'd been living with for 20 years had become critical. "I went in to help them, but I was the handicapped person. They were offering me friendship more than I could offer them. I got knocked down every day, was forced to develop character every day."

From his disabled friends he learned that "everybody has a heart and a heart's knowing. The task is to hear the heart's knowing of the other, not overcome it." That is the process of political deliberation which Burmon believes the founding fathers intended. He'd found its first existing model in the community of the disabled.

Now, his back problems improving with physical therapy as he plans his new career, he says, "I am a recovering coward."

In today's climate, he believes, while leaders present us "with a false good and a false bad," patriotism is a commitment "to union and a resolution of differences and in showing the world how to do that." Beginning in each citizen as a personal spiritual examination, "it becomes political, but it raises the political to a new realm."

But first Americans must wake up. "We're all the sleeping giant," says Burmon. And the giant is conscience.

Steve Baggarly of the Norfolk Catholic Worker would like to wake up Americans, too. That's why he got himself arrested at the Langley Air Force Base AirPower show on June 22 and at the nation's Capitol during a peace march on April 22. (For details, see Upfront, this issue.)

But Baggarly is no patriot in the Bush sense. Far from it.

"If patriotism means nationalism," he says -- "if it means elevating our country above others, that our people have more value, that we're more civilized and that sort of thing -- it is against what we believe in."

Unlike Burmon, though, Baggarly finds little authority in the values of the founders. They mandated privilege for white, land-owning males only. They bought and sold slaves.

His authority is the example of Jesus. Speaking for himself as a member of the Catholic Worker movement, he says, "We're coming at it from a faith perspective. We attempt to value all peoples and all nations equally. We're all human beings, created and loved by God. We all share one nature. We're all one family. That's the cosmic reality. We think it is the more important starting point."

In this world view, "countries are just arbitrary borders. If being a patriot means loving your country, I guess I would be a world patriot. Christianity calls us to (that)."

His Christianity also demands a commitment to non-violence and service to the suffering. Therefore, he rejects all war, urges immediate disarmament and dismantling of the weapons industry, and supports a broad redistribution of the world's wealth, with rich nations compensating poor ones for resources previously plundered. He'd like to see Americans "begin to live on just our share."

The supportive zeal that in some is devotion to country seems in Baggarly to be devotion directly to God. That's why he crashed the patriotic celebration at Langley.

"Those planes are our idols," he says. "They're what we really worship. We trust them for our salvation, peace, freedom, security. We give all those attributes over to weapons." The B-52, he says, "is a nuclear-capable, deep-penetrating bomber, used to carpet bomb (people) all over the world." It's a symbol of empire.

But Baggarly's vision is of "a nation of faith, which is truly trying to place its trust in God rather than weapons of mass destruction."

Steeped as a child in the lore of pacifism and civil disobedience, I find that hard to argue with. I also find it hard to separate it significantly from Burmon's conclusions. Both, while transcending the popular patriotism of Bush, seem quite patriotic to me. I, too, believe in the revolutionary ideals of the enlightenment -- liberty, equality, fraternity -- which, I also believe, ultimately derive from the life and teachings of Jesus. I agree that the country's authority and interests are intended to transcend nationalism and arbitrary borders.

But where is my authentic zeal? What kind of patriot am I?

To answer that would take a book, which, incidentally, I've already published -- Lunar Fool. It's available from any on-line bookseller.