Small Wonder (25 page)

Stating these realities is not so poetic, granted, but it is absolutely a form of patriotism. Questioning our government's actions does not violate the principles of liberty, equality, and freedom of speech; it exercises them, and by exercise we grow stronger. I have read enough of Thomas Jefferson to feel sure he would back me up on this. Our founding fathers, those vocal critics of imperialism, were among the world's first leaders to under
stand that to a democratic people, freedom of speech and belief are not just nice luxuries, they're as necessary as breathing. The authors of our Constitution knew, from experience with King George and company, that governments don't remain benevolent to the interests of all, including their less powerful members, without constant vigilance and reasoned criticism. And so the founding fathers guaranteed the right of reasoned criticism in our citizenship contract—for
always
. No emergency shutdowns allowed. However desperate things may get, there are to be no historical moments when beliefs can be abridged, vegetarians required to praise meat, Christians forced to pray as Muslims, or vice versa. Angry critics have said to me in stressful periods, “Don't you understand it's
wartime?
” As if this were just such a historical moment of emergency shutdown. Yes, we all know it's wartime. It's easy to speak up for peace in peacetime—anybody can do that. Now is when it gets hard. But our flag is not just a logo for wars; it's the flag of American pacifists, too. It's the flag of all of us who love our country enough to do the hard work of living up to its highest ideals.

I have two American flags. Both were gifts. One was handmade out of colored paper by my younger child; it's a few stars shy of regulation but nonetheless cherished. Each has its place in my home, so I can look up from time to time and remember, That's
mine
. Maybe this is hard for some men to understand, but that emblem wasn't handed to me by soldiers on foreign soil; it wasn't
handed
to me by men at all—they withheld it from women for our nation's first century and a half. I would never have gained it if everyone's idea of patriotism had been simply to go along with the status quo. That flag protects and represents me only because of Ida B. Wells, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and countless other women who risked everything so I could be a full citizen. Each of us who is female, or nonwhite, or without land, would have been guaranteed in 1776 the same voting rights as a horse. We owe a
precious debt to courageous Americans before us who risked threats and public ridicule for an unpopular cause: ours. Now that flag is mine to carry on, promising me that I may, and that I must, continue believing in the dignity and sanctity of life, and stating that position in a public forum.

And so I would like to stand up for my flag and wave it over a few things I believe in, including but not limited to the protection of dissenting points of view. After 225 years, I vote to retire the rockets' red glare and the bloody bandage as obsolete symbols of Old Glory. We desperately need a new iconography of patriotism. I propose that we rip strips of cloth from the uniforms of the unbelievably courageous firefighters who rescued the injured and panic-stricken from the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and remained at their posts until the buildings collapsed on them. Praise the red glare of candles held up in vigils everywhere as peace-loving people pray for the bereaved and plead for compassionate resolutions. Honor the blood donated to the Red Cross; respect the stars of all kinds who have used their influence to raise funds for humanitarian assistance; glory in the generous hands of schoolchildren collecting pennies, teddy bears, and anything else they think might help the kids who've lost their moms and dads. Let me sing praise to the ballot box and the jury box, and to the unyielding protest marches of my foremothers who fought for those rights so I could be fully human under our Constitution. What could be a more honorable symbol of American freedom than the suffragist's banner, the striker's picket, the abolitionist's drinking gourd, the placards of humane protest from every decade of our forward-marching history? Let me propose aloud that the dove is at least as honorable a creature as the carnivorous eagle. And give me liberty, now, with signs of life.

Shortly after the September attacks, my town became famous for a simple gesture in which some eight thousand people wearing red, white, or blue T-shirts assembled themselves in the shape of a
flag on a baseball field and had their photograph taken from above. That picture soon began to turn up everywhere, but we saw it first on our newspaper's front page. Our family stood in silence for a minute looking at that stunningly beautiful photograph of a human flag, trying to know what to make of it. Then my teenager, who has a quick mind for numbers and a sensitive heart, did an interesting thing. She laid her hand over part of the picture, leaving visible more or less five thousand people, and said, “In New York, that many might be dead.” We stared at what that looked like—that many innocent souls, particolored and packed into a conjoined destiny—and shuddered at the one simple truth behind all the noise, which was that so many beloved, fragile lives were suddenly gone from us. That is my flag, and that's what it means: We're all just people, together.

O
nce, not so very long ago, but before I knew how to handle these situations, a reporter came to visit us from the big city for the apparent purpose of finding out what made me tick and revealing it to others. From the start I suspected that this whole thing was not the best idea. I thought about how Georgia O'Keeffe had dealt with a reporter who showed up at her door declaring, “I've come all the way from New York just to see you.” Ms. O'Keeffe stood glaring a moment from her doorway and then said, “This is the front,” then turned around and said, “This is the back. Now you've seen me.” And slammed the
door. I actually tried my own genteel version of that, explaining that I honestly was not all that interesting and she'd be better off interviewing a movie star or something, but this gal was not to be headed off at the pass. Into my life she marched, in sunglasses and snappy shoes, wondering what I was all about.

How would
you
show a person how you tick? I considered giving her a tour of my office, but my writing desk looked the way it usually does: as if a valiant struggle involving lots and lots of papers had recently been fought and lost in there. This theme tends to repeat itself throughout our house—hmm, next the valiant struggle appears to have torn across all the beds, leaving the sheets tangled, then it must have passed through the playroom, touching off forceful eruptions of doll clothing and Legos, before finally exiting out the front door. One end of our dining table looks as if someone's running a mail-order business from it, but I swear it isn't me. Our house reveals about us the same thing my friends' homes do about them: here lives a busy family, most of whom have better things to do than put every single teensy thing exactly back where it belongs the minute they're done with it. I've heard that the amazing Martha Stewart has created a line of paints based on the tints of the eggs laid by her Araucana hens. I wonder, would she be interested in a line of less muted hues based on the molds I found growing on the end of the loaf of bread this morning?

All right, I had straightened up a bit. Tossed out the bread, made the beds. I come from the South and am therefore genetically incapable—my husband says—of receiving company without making at least a little fuss. But when the reporter arrived (an hour late), I decided to take her out to the garden. It was already getting on toward suppertime, and besides, if you want to know why a zebra has stripes, you should look at it in the tall grass, right? My garden always looks great—I win nearly every valiant struggle there. The vegetables are forever trying to get out of hand, the melons want to squash, and the spinach tries to bolt, but
I keep them in line. I unlatched the gate and we walked into an early-autumn paradise shaded by my plum and Asian pear trees. Squash and gourd vines winked their yellow-eyed blossoms at us from the green wall of foliage that climbed the high fence. Long, elegant dipper gourds hung down from the trellis over our heads in a graduated array, like God's wife's measuring spoons.

While I harvested a basket of tomatoes and armloads of basil for pesto, I tried to explain that this, for example, was one of the things I am about. I'm someone who grows vegetables for her own table, not just to pass the time but as a kind of moral decision about how I want to live. She interrupted suddenly, asking, “Do you, like, meditate out here?” I backed up a few steps and explained that no, I, like, grew food out here. That as a matter of fact, we were going to be eating this stuff in a little while. She peered out over her sunglasses and asked, “Why? Don't you have stores out here?” And I backed up a few more steps, and then a few more, and pretty soon I just gave up. “Out here” was her code for incomprehensible territory, and that was where I lived. My kids came in and all of us had dinner together, and we treated our guest with all the deference and consideration one can offer a person who has shown up at the door hungry but doesn't speak or understand the language.

She went back to the big city and reported that I am not very open with strangers, have quaint ideas, and pay too much attention to my kids. I learned that Georgia O'Keeffe was right: The front and the back are all you should ever show to a person who doesn't really want the inside.

 

Most of the time I go right on growing tomatoes and basil and broccoli simply because they are good, we like them, I'm determined to figure out the right planting time for cole crops, and
broccoli attracts hordes of green looper caterpillars that throw Lily's chickens into paroxysms of chicken joy. I do it because the world has announced to me, loudly, that it's time to make a choice between infinite material entitlement or a more modest, self-reliant security, and this is a step I can take in the right direction. Most of the time I raise up my wonderful daughters to have what I hope will be a useful blend of smart-aleck acuity and politeness, and once in a while we go down to help out the homeless shelter or dig a community vegetable garden because I want my kids to understand that compassion involves not just the heart but the hands. I write my poems, my congressmen, my letters to the editor, and I go on believing as I do, whether it makes any sense from the front and the back or not.

But like anyone else I am liable to be misunderstood, or scolded for standing apart from the crowd. I'm just one of a multitude of writers who venture outside the approved current of opinion
du jour
to get a better view of the complex struggle to reconcile cultural, national, and moral imperatives. Inevitably, some extremists will not tolerate this kind of art or dialogue. I've been called all the predictable names and some unpredictable ones; I've been misquoted in inflammatory ways by hate radio and its print equivalent in an attempt to impugn my patriotism and scare away readers. The historical mode of attack on writers (which continues into the present) is to avoid discussion of our actual ideas and instead declare us un-American for fabricated reasons and pronounce direly that no one had better listen to us, they'd best play it safe and just hate us. Inevitably, a few citizens will oblige: Some irate souls have vowed to uncover my true identity(!). Some are praying for my immortal soul, and two have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country. (If I used them both, where would I end up?) I accept these gifts with the understanding that these people haven't the faintest idea who I am. It's important and worth noting here that the vitriolic mail almost never comes from
anyone who has
read
me, but only from those who've read
about
me. It seems a certain sector has been led to associate my name with treason and sedition. Wow. The public may expect a circus, and fireworks—as Mark Twain wrote in bold-faced type on a handbill announcing one of his lectures—“in fact, the public may be invited to expect whatever they please.” But they'll find no treason or sedition at my house, and they've rather pathetically missed my point, which is that it's
love
for my homeland that obliges me to participate in the discussion of preserving its integrity, and to take any risk necessary on my country's behalf. Otherwise, believe me, I'd live a safe and happy life writing cookbooks, or better yet, just cooking. It seems bizarre that a firm dedication to peace and the goodness of life should draw violent ire, but it does. Think of Gandhi, of Martin Luther King Jr. I'm hardly a drop in this river of tears and belief. Sometimes my heart catches in my throat and I just have to stop for a second with my hand on a doorknob or the cold metal of a key, assemble in my heart the grace of all we have to believe in, and say my own prayer for us all—that we will find the way through each hour of our lives that will have been worthy of the task.

In the long run I find it hardest to bear adversaries on the other end of the spectrum: those who couldn't care less, who won't or can't fathom the honest depths of love and grief, who opt out of the bull-ride through life in favor of the sleeping berth. These are the ones who say it's ridiculous to imagine that the world could be made better than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and drive.

I fight that; I fight it as if I were drowning. When I come down to this feeling that I am an army of one standing out on the broad plain waving my little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two and offer to make dinner for us. We remind ourselves that we aren't standing apart from the crowd, we
are
a crowd. We're a prairie
fire, a church choir, a major note in the American chord, and the dominant one in the song of the world: a million North American students rejecting the tyranny of the logo and the sweatshop behind it; a thousand farmers in India lying down on their soil to prevent its being seeded with a crop that would steal their history and future; a hundred sheep farmers in southern France defying a fast-food hegemony by making cheese in limestone caves exactly as their great-grandparents did; tribal elders from east to west inviting peace to enter the world through its Hopi cloud dancers and its Sufi dancers; the Women in Black who stand in eloquent silence on every continent, refusing the wars that would eat their sons and daughters alive. We're the theater of the street, the accurate joy of children's hearts, the literature of tomorrow's wisdom arrived today, just in time. I'm with Emma Goldman: Our revolution will have dancing—and excellent food. In the long run, the choice of life over death is too good to resist.

When all else fails and I forget this, on those late nights when all the lights have gone out on my soul, I go into my office and read the
other
mail, the piles of love notes that outnumber the hateful letters two hundred to one. (Why does praise go in one ear and out the other, for so many of us, while we memorize criticisms verbatim? For the same reason the radio plays two hundred songs about loneliness for every one about family reunions. We hang our hats on heartache.) I am sustained by the kindness of strangers, who often send me remarkable gifts from the blue: a watercolor painting of a beloved bookshelf, a bar of handmade soap scented with rosemary, an exquisite book on the silk moths of North America, some precious tale of wonder or kindness, or just the perfection of gratitude, simply expressed. I can't possibly feel alone when so many—from prisoners to presidents, but mostly just everyday people—have accepted my words into their lives as they would the companionship of a friend, who say to me quietly in the park or the grocery when I'm least expecting it, “Thank
you. Keep writing.” And so I will, and when I need my own life-line of words I read Walt Whitman, George Eliot, John Steinbeck, Arundhati Roy—people who have understood how to look life in the eye and love it back.

I fight against the drowning, knowing I can never go into the swamp of cynicism because if I do, I may never come out again. I'm not put together that way. I have children who are more precious to me than my life, and every molecule in me wants to promise them we'll get through this. We won't blow up the world before they get a crack at doing all the things grown-ups get to do in this howling hoot of a party: stand on your own two feet, get your heart broken, get over it, vote, drive a car, not drive a car, get dog-tired doing something that makes you proud, play the radio station
you
want, wear your heart on your sleeve, dance on the table, make a scene, be ridiculous, be amazing, be stronger than you knew, make a sacrifice that matters, find out what you're made of, cook a perfect meal, read a perfect book, kiss for an hour, fall in love for keeps, make love, make a baby, stand over your own naked child weeping for dread and wonder at the miracle.

If I got to make just one law, it would be that the men who make the decisions to drop bombs would first, every time, have to spend one whole day taking care of a baby. We were not made to do this killing thing, I swear. Back up. It's a big mistake.

 

The public is invited to think what it pleases, but to call me naive would be flat-out wrong. I have lived in a lot of different countries. So many, in fact, that now on some occasions when I'm asked here to vote yes or no, I want to color outside the lines. I turn over the referendum to look on the back for option 3: “RESOLVED to live with a little less so we can all share in the safety of having enough.” In many countries, they give you that
option. Our leaders tell us that these problems of ours are insoluble except by force, and that we must cede certain casualties to poverty and violence, and yet nearly every problem has already been solved by someone, somewhere: I've witnessed first-hand the blessedly kind health-care system of Spain, and I'd like to see ours follow its example. And the examples of Curitiba, Brazil, which recycles 70 percent of its trash, and Freiburg, Germany, which has brought back its streetcars and made automobiles unnecessary. Paris, Tokyo, and a hundred other municipalities have efficient public transportation systems that I'd like in my own city, thank you. I'd like an end to corporate welfare and multimillion-dollar CEO salaries so we could put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have done before us. I'd like us to consume energy, on average, at the modest level Europeans do, and then go them one better. I'd like a government that creatively subsidizes renewable energy and conservation, as Canada has done in some of its public school buildings, earning more than 100 percent return on the investment—which is returned again to the schools as equipment and teacher salaries. I would like us to ratify the Kyoto Protocol today and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with the help of legislation that will ease us into safer, less wasteful, sensibly reorganized lives. I'd like to stake my pride on a nation that consistently inspires rather than bullies, that brings unconditional generosity to the table, and that dispenses justice over the inevitable bad deal with diplomacy and honor rather than with more bad deals. If this were the humane face we showed the world and the model we brought to working with it, every time, I believe our children might eventually be able to manage with a military budget the size of Iceland's.