‘Love it or leave it’ notion is still giving me pause

(Editor’s note: Elizabeth Randall wrote this essay in 2007; it was published in the Sentinel as a guest column. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s recent calls for those who criticize the United States to “love it or leave it,” she asked that it be reprinted: “It’s amazing how appropriate it is today.”)

When I see bumper stickers urging me to love my country or to leave it, it gives me pause. It’s not just because I’m an aging former hippie and part of the less-than-great generation who partied through their adolescence and young adulthood and for whom the 21st century, frankly, seems like just a really bad hangover. No, it’s because America is like a big amorphous family with related regions, sister states, mother lodes of mountains and founding fathers carved on Mount Rushmore. It’s full of millions of people with different accents, traditions, habits and tastes. And to be perfectly honest, it’s not all one big happy family, especially since the Republicans have instituted a figurative fashion trend among the poor and middle-class that favors barrels.

Unlike the song from the musical “Hair,” I am not crazy for the red, white and blue, and the yellow fringe. Love it or leave it intimates passion, and that I accept every tree, rock and speck of dirt in America and everyone who treads on it unconditionally, magnanimously and just the way it is. I don’t. I’ve traveled considerably in my life, and there are parts of America that are so dreary and depressing that I’d take my chances on Saturn before I’d risk living there. Like Immokalee, for example, the poor side of Collier County, where the only thing in town besides school and migrant housing is a 7-Eleven and open pick-up trucks sentried by pit bulls. And what about Mexia, home of the late Anna Nicole Smith? Basically, the Texas town is a barren lot with a Dairy Queen and roiling tumbleweed. Even her notoriety didn’t improve it.

Then there are the people in America that set my teeth on edge. I know it’s irrational, but I really can’t stand bigots, although I understand that they can’t help it and they are born with just one lone functioning brain cell flickering hate like a permanent neon light in the empty cavern between their ears. Yet I don’t want to live near them or have their children go to school with my children. I also have a hard time with people who use the Bible as their sole ambiguous justification for every inequitable condition in society. Even the bumper-sticker carriers with their terse missive and their implied condemnation based on an irrational emotion indicate a lack of insight that I find alarming, yet at the same time trite.

I do love parts of my country. I love the Florida Keys with its fragile white sand bars etching across blue water. I love the quality of light in New York City, and filigree Spanish moss in Georgia. There is nothing like the autumn leaves in North Carolina or the desert on a summer night under a full moon in Phoenix. I love the highways and byways of America where I can drive forever, the asphalt road streaming under the tires of my car like lava. And I do love most of the people I’ve met in America, almost all of whom originated from the foreign lands that the above bumper sticker urges us to return to if we notice anything that hinders our unbounded affection for the land of the free.

But if I have to put the whole package together, if I have to count the traffic, the pollution, the oil spills the natural and unnatural recipes for disaster such as hurricanes and the religious right, then the best I can hope for is to genuinely like America. I realize this makes me a nogood, commie, terrorist-loving, evil sack of anthrax. But it’s the truth.

I am naïve enough to believe that in America the truth stands for something. Maybe if I live long enough my affection for everything under its spacious skies will extend to all of it; in fact, I already miss the ozone layer. As it is, the best I can muster up is a new bumper sticker slogan:

America: If I really, really like it, can I still stay?