In the shadow of hope

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Pride in the nation is near historic lows. WORLD Commentator Janie B. Cheaney says that’s not the first time the country has faced disappointment—or the question of what patriotism requires.

JANIE B. CHEANEY: The Bicentennial of 1976 came hard on the heels of Watergate, a presidential resignation, and a disgraceful exit from Vietnam. Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” released in 1973 and set to a tune from Bach’s St. Matthews Passion, wistfully looked back at American promises unfulfilled.

But, as Independence Day drew near, patriotic enthusiasm surged. Red, white, and blue draped storefronts and street lamps as cities stocked up for mammoth fireworks displays. Operation Sail organized sixteen international tall ships and dozens of other sailing vessels in a grand procession to New York harbor. 

On July 4th, Americans spilled out to the streets for noisy parades of school bands, patriotic floats, and Uncle Sams on stilts.

And then the dismal decade resumed with more inflation, unemployment, and a hostage crisis. 

Nearly broke with a toddler and a baby, my husband and I drove out of the 1970s in an ailing Datsun hatchback.

Cycles rise and fall, and soon it was “Morning in America.” 

By the end of the ’80s we had arrived at respectable middle class—two cars and a mortgage. One peaceful evening, as the family walked around our neighborhood of comfortable homes and well-kept lawns, our daughter remarked, “It doesn’t get any better than this.”

But with our semiquincentennial dead ahead, our nation looks even more malaise-ridden than it did in 1976. 

The Harvard Youth Poll reports that only 41% of young adults are proud of their country, while 27% are embarrassed. A more general Gallup poll finds only 38% of Americans “extremely proud”—the lowest number since 2007. 

Some blame the current administration, but the polls widely reported today were taken two or three years ago. Disenchantment with the American experiment is not that new.

How about you? Are you proud to be an American?

Our founding fathers might have considered that an odd question. Though conscious of altering world history, they were less confident about America’s future. “A republic, if you can keep it” was Benjamin Franklin’s ambiguous reply to the lady who asked him the result of the Constitutional convention.

They were practical idealists. They aimed high, but bowed to political expediency. They hoped for modest prosperity and peace under every man’s vine and fig tree, and probably never dreamed they had unleashed a stampede of ambition and innovation that trampled many underfoot, but lifted many more out of desperate poverty. 

On earth, it really doesn’t get better than that.

In his book Land of Hope, author and scholar Wilfred McClay offers a balanced history with necessary caveats. In a speech at Hillsdale College he explained how “hope” can be, as he describes it, a “double-edged quality:”

AUDIO: Because to be a land of hope is also to be a land of disappointment, a land of frustration, a land of disillusionment. And we experience all these things. We wouldn’t experience them if we weren’t a land of hope.

A nation that bases its founding on lofty ideals is bound to fall short at times. What can we expect of flawed human beings? Cynical critics and angry protestors must be naïve about human nature—or else simply ungrateful for the blessings of liberty our Constitution aimed to secure.

The political scene is not encouraging, but by God’s grace we’re still here. “Let him who boasts, boast in the Lord,” advises Jeremiah. But we can rightly love our homeland. She deserves it...

Even more, she needs it.

I’m Janie B. Cheaney.

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