Kennedy got it wrong. The real Kennedy, not the nepo baby crackpot currently rasping around trying to get Trump elected. I’m talking about his presidential uncle, JFK, who famously declaimed: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”
It’s a good line. Folks love that line. It’s also total BS.
The fact is, most of us are here by happenstance. We found ourselves pushed into a world neither of our making nor our choosing. The fact that we find ourselves in this particular nation at this particular time is no more than luck of the draw. So why do I owe a single, solitary thing to this landmass on which I find myself?
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Why should I ask myself what I can do for America when America is letting so many of us down?
There are many ways to think of a nation. One way is the JFK model: The nation is a home and all of us are responsible for maintaining and improving that home. That’s a pleasant way to think of it, but it also implies a family structure because a home, after all, is a place to house a family.
So what happens when the other family members aren’t holding up their end of the deal? What happens when Mom and Dad won’t stop bickering long enough to make sure the light bill gets paid? What happens when the family is a dysfunctional mess? What if I’m doing my part by washing the dishes but the roof is falling on my head?
I used to think of my nation as a home and my fellow Americans as, in a sense, my family. I feel that less and less. Not because I’ve “given up” on America, but because I’m not sure I ever understood America to begin with.
I’ve started to think about Kennedy’s words with something resembling bitterness. Yes, I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve had in my life. But I can’t honestly say they were given to me by “America” any more than I can say the macaroni and cheese I made for lunch was given to me by Kraft. I paid for that mac and cheese and I have paid for America.
And America continues to let me down.
What does any nation owe its citizenry in return for the citizens’ allegiance? Safety, certainly. Can the U.S. be said to be holding up its end of the deal when people are routinely slaughtered in shopping malls, churches, concerts, and schools?
What about health care? Education? Infrastructure? What about opportunity-for-all? Is this nation, the richest and most powerful that history has ever known, using its vast resources to improve the lives of all Americans?
The question is rhetorical because the answer is obvious.
I’m not even going to even talk about our foreign follies over the last 80 years. I’m confining this conversation to our domestic situation and the lack of a cohesive national vision. We haven’t known who we were since the Soviets tapped out in the early ’90s.
Even then, what were we? A beacon of freedom in a darkening world? That’s the story we liked to tell ourselves, but it was always, at best, an exaggeration. Since World War II, what we’ve mostly been is a war machine sponsored by Ronald McDonald. The Soviets just gave us a place to point our missiles.
The values we claim to support: democracy, freedom, equality. Those same values we bomb other countries into accepting aren’t even being practiced at home. We’re neither the freest, most democratic, nor most equal nation.
Not even close.
Instead, we’re backtracking as we relitigate important questions about reproductive rights, freedom of self-expression, and the ability of any and all of us to rise through the narrow chokepoint of American opportunity to become, to quote the old Army recruitment poster, all we can be.
This isn’t about the 2024 election. I’m not going to embody the cliche of so many liberal Americans of privilege—saying I’m going to flee the nation if Donald Trump wins.
Increasingly, I’m not sure it matters who wins in November. Can any person reorient this hobbling and sclerotic nation in four years? In eight? What can be done to reinvigorate/redefine our national identity? Must we have another goddamned world war for Americans to find purpose?
If we’re going to defend so-called “American exceptionalism,” then let’s start by making this place exceptional. Not just for attendees of the Met Gala but for everybody.
I’m going to continue to advocate for this nation right up until the moment I leave it (should that day ever come). I’m going to advocate for the things I used to believe about this nation, not because I owe it anything, but because it owes me, just as it owes all of us. Allegiance is a two-way street. If you want ours, you’ve got to give us yours.
So I’m asking questions.
Why are health care costs out of control? Why are students starting their professional lives saddled with a hundred thousand dollars or more in student loan debt? Why can’t families survive on a single income? Why doesn’t the nation offer daycare for working mothers?
Why are educational outcomes in this country so bad for so many people? Why do minorities die at a higher rate than the majority population? Why does the richest nation in the world have falling life expectancy while other nations are seeing their citizens live longer lives?
Above all, I’m asking this: What can my country do for me?
