To Root Against Your Country (a blast from the past)

[BrotherBuzz]

(the more things change, the more they stay the same) :shrug:

TO ROOT AGAINST YOUR COUNTRY

byArthur Hoppe
March 5, 1971


The radio this morning said the Allied invasion of
Laos had bogged down. Without thinking, I nodded and
said, "Good."

And having said it, I realized the bitter truth: Now I
root against my own country.

This is how far we have come in this hated and endless
war. This is the nadir I have reached in this winter
of my discontent. This is how close I border on
treason:

Now I root against my own country.

How frighteningly sad this is. My generation was
raised to love our country and we loved it
unthinkingly. We licked Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini.
Those were our shining hours. Those were our days of
faith.

They were evil; we were good. They told lies; we spoke
the truth. Our cause was just, our purposes noble, and
in victory we were magnanimous. What a wonderful
country we are! I loved it so.

But now, having descended down the torturous,
brutalizing years of this bloody war, I have come to
the dank and lightless bottom of the well: I have come
to root against the country that once I blindly loved.


I can rationalize it. I can say that if the invasion
of Laos succeeds, the chimera of victory will dance
once again before our eyes -- leading us once again
into more years of mindless slaughter. Thus, I can
say, I hope the invasion fails.

But it is more than that. It is that I have come to
hate my country's role in Vietnam.

I hate the massacres, the body counts, the free fire
zones, the napalming of civilians, the poisoning of
rice crops. I hate being part of My Lai. I hate the
fact that we have now dropped more explosives on these
scrawny Asian peasants than we did on all our enemies
in World War II.

And I hate my leaders, who, over the years, have
conscripted our young men and sent them there to kill
or be killed in a senseless cause simply because they
can find no honorable way out -- no honorable way out
for them.

I don't root for the enemy. I doubt they are any
better than we. I don't give a damn anymore who wins
the day. But because I hate what my country is doing
in Vietnam, I emotionally and often irrationally hope
that it fails.

It is a terrible thing to root against your own
country. If I were alone, it wouldn't matter. But I
don't think I am alone. I think many Americans must
feel these same sickening emotions I feel. I think
they share my guilt. I think they share my rage.

If this is true, we must end this war now -- in
defeat, if necessary. We must end it because all of
Southeast Asia is not worth the hatred, shame, guilt
and rage that is tearing Americans apart. We must end
it not for those among our young who have come to hate
America, but for those who somehow manage to love it
still.

I doubt that I can ever again love my country in that
unthinking way that I did when I was young. Perhaps
this is a good thing.

But I would hope the day will come when I can once
again believe what my country says and once again
approve of what it does. I want to have faith once
more in the justness of my country's causes and the
nobleness of its ideals.

What I want so very much is to be able once again to
root for my own, my native land.