When Patriotism Turns to Ashes

Who hasn’t heard some overzealous, potbellied “patriot” espouse a foreign policy that amounts to genocide by way of the Stars and Stripes? While getting my hair cut at a local barbershop recently, I heard someone say, “If we’d have turned that place [insert Middle Eastern locale here] into a glass parking lot, we wouldn’t still be dealing with this.” Whatever this is. The place they typically wish to nuke is as far from their understanding as their hairlines are from where they used to be.

How can someone wish wholesale destruction on a place they’ve never even been? With unbridled bravado, people will wish death on complete strangers without a second thought. Believe it or not, there are some amazing people in those places—some of the most devout religious individuals you’ve ever met. Sure, we may disagree on the tenets of our preferred theology or cultural ideals, but the average person in those war-torn regions is no different than you or me. They just want to live and provide for their families. I imagine the same is true for those who spout this unguided rhetoric.

If we take our xenophobic hats off for just a millisecond, we would recognize that the actions of a few practitioners of a given religion or culture don’t—and shouldn’t—represent the people as a whole. It would be no different than all Christians being judged by the actions of Greg Locke or the Westboro Baptist Church. They may know the book and verse, but the love of God is far from their venomous lips. I would hope the same could be said of those we deem enemies simply because someone told us they were. Their chants of “Death to America” are likely as misguided as our counter-chants.

If I lean further into the religious angle and borrow a trope from the ’90s… WWJD? What Would Jesus Do? Even if you don’t subscribe to Christianity, you’ve likely heard his teachings on loving one another and making peace where possible. We are told to love our enemies and be good Samaritans—not to wish death on strangers. Surely, he wouldn’t condone murdering the innocent in retribution. We are all measured equally in the end, and all of us have fallen short of the glory of God. So, in that light, we are all equally condemned.

The irony is, God sent a prophet to that exact region of the world millennia ago. Just like my fellow patron in the barbershop, Jonah had a serious problem with “those people.” He fled God’s command. He went as far away as he possibly could. He couldn’t—or wouldn’t—see that the “others” were just as deserving of God’s grace as he was.

How many times have we let our anger or cultural indifference sentence people to death? Whether it be by cheering drone strikes or by refusing to recognize certain cultures as human, we are all guilty—if we’re being honest. Sometimes our outrage and desire for vengeance are justified, or at least understandable, like in the cases of Pearl Harbor or 9/11, but only when aimed at the correct perpetrators. In the case of 9/11, we somehow leaped from Saudis to Iraqis—but that’s a story for another day.

I’m not here to judge anyone. I found myself getting caught up in the American thirst for blood after we were attacked. I wanted nothing more than to make them—whoever they were—pay for what they did to us—whoever we are. Although I’ll never forget that day, we have more than repaid blood for blood in the twenty years that followed. We learned, by having boots on the ground, that in many cases the people wanted the same freedoms we did and, at the end of the day, just wanted to be left alone to live life as they saw fit. We likely created more “terrorists” than we ever killed anyway, just by our very presence in their countries. I don’t blame them; I imagine I’d feel the same way if a foreign force were stationed in my backyard. They didn’t have many easy choices, caught between fundamentalists on one side and outsiders on the other.

The relative peace we find ourselves in as a country scares the hell out of me. This is a new phenomenon. My entire adult life—and much of my youth—we were at war with one country or another. We are currently funding a proxy war with Russia by way of Ukraine, and boomers still remembering the Cold War have started repeating those glass parking lot mantras again. Fear is a great motivator to do the most abhorrent things, even if only in speech.

I’m no hippie, but having seen who we can become during seasons of war, I just hope we remember that the “others” are people too. Maybe one day we’ll realize that we’re all humans. To quote George Santayana, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” I hope he’s wrong, and I hope our parking lots stay paved in concrete or asphalt.

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Stan Lake is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker from Bethania, North Carolina. His work has been published in Reptiles Magazine, Dirtbag Magazine, Lethal Minds Journal, Backcountry Journal, Wildlife in North Carolina, SOFLETE, The Tarheel Guardsman, Wildsound Writing Festival, and others. His poetry collection “A Toad in a Glass Jar” is scheduled for publication in late fall 2024 by Dead Reckoning Collective. He has written three Children’s books and one Christian Devotional book. He filmed and directed a documentary about his deployment in Iraq with the Army called “Hammer Down.” He spends most of his free time wrangling toads.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.