Letter to America

Just Thinking Land That I Love

by Jordan M. Poss

Ileft the mountains nine years ago for two good reasons: work and getting married. I love my work, and I love my wife and the three children we have had since then, but that move was hard for two other reasons: first, I’m a country boy, and leaving Rabun County for the suburbs and freeways of upstate South Carolina was a trial; and second, in my exciting new job I had to teach American History. At Clemson I had studied medieval Britain and military history, and so when the first college to give me a job saddled me with US History I had a lot of work to do—refreshing my memory, filling in gaps, studying things I had never cared about. And it wasn’t just a challenge because of the narrowness of my training. There was the subject itself. Thanks to teaching it, for the first time I developed a whole, beginning-to-end picture of the history of the United States, and it wasn’t all pretty. But I believe in approaching the past charitably, taking the good with the bad and neither apologizing nor condemning, striving only to present it as fairly and clearly as possible so that a student can put themselves in the shoes of long-dead people and understand them. That’s what I strove to do. I grew a lot, and those poor students who had me during my rookie year seemed to, too. But I actually stumbled into the most important lesson I learned that year on the last day. I’m a storyteller by nature and teach history as a narrative, and that day I felt that even the still unfinished story of the United States deserved a summing up. I can’t remember my exact words, but I said that during our year we had studied both the good and the bad, and seen the criminal as well as the truly heroic. Some people, I said, will want to emphasize only the good; others will dwell entirely on the bad. Both of them will probably have some ulterior motive for doing so and will tell you that it’s wrong to criticize something you love or wrong to love something with so much to criticize. Both approaches will mislead you. I concluded with the only words I do remember exactly: “Don’t love it because it’s perfect, love it because it’s yours.” When you love something because it’s yours—your old dog, your fixer-upper house, your high-maintenance car, your orneriest family member—honesty about its flaws isn’t a threat. Honesty is freedom. Honesty also offers perspective. The last few years people from all sides of the political spectrum have indulged in some staggeringly hyperbolic talk, the kind of talk that reveals a memory thinned and hollowed out by the news media’s search for the latest and most scandalous and social media’s thundering echo chamber, the kind of talk that shows a shallow understanding of history. We have had worse violence among our own citizens. We have had more corrupt elections. We have had more dishonest media. We have allowed graver injustices to whole groups of people. We have had greater threats to the Constitution. We have been more divided. We have even had worse, much worse, epidemics. I think everyone understands the way history can put things into perspective. We are historical creatures. In the same way that we all understand our own life stories as stories, we also instinctively take the long view when we need some relief from our problems in the present. That makes history important, and unfortunately anything important is the object of political feuding today. This too is understandable, up to a point. Americans have never settled what exactly the American “nation” is. We’re not a nation in the literal sense—a group of people with common ancestors—like the nation of Israel in the Old Testament. We come from many nations. (My own ancestors are German, English, and Welsh. Just so many “white people” to some, but wildly different and interesting groups, especially in their places in the American story.) An alternative was to propose America as a nation united by core political principles. This is the vision familiar from the Gettysburg Address—not a nation of blood but of ideals. But that was obviously untrue at the time and wasn’t really settled by the outcome of the Lincoln’s war, and so another alternative, of Americans as a nation united simply by a shared history, with shared heroes and shared glories, came to the fore. For a while. Not everyone has studied or even thought about these competing visions in these terms, and many people feel bits of all of them. And so as partisans tear apart American history and what it means today, they don’t argue but talk past each other. What I’d like to propose—not as a solution, because we have plenty of those, but as a balm—is a way to cut through the ups and downs of American history, the political disputes, and the vexed and unanswerable question of what makes 300 million people of hundreds of different ethnic backgrounds a nation: love of country.

Jordan M. Poss is a native of Rabun County, in the beautiful north Georgia mountains. In 2010 he graduated from Clemson University, where he studied Anglo-Saxon England and military history, with an MA in European History. He currently teaches Western Civ and American History at Piedmont Technical College in Greenwood, South Carolina. He lives in upstate South Carolina with his wife—a Texas native—and three children. He has authored four novels to date and has appeared on many podcasts. For more information on Jordan’s writing, his books and podasts please visit www.jordanmposs.com

And I mean country literally. This is what it originally meant to be a patriot—a lover of one’s patria, one’s fatherland. It strikes me that when we sing a lot of the grand old patriotic songs, we sing explicitly about this topic as the thing that actually unites us, physically. In “America the Beautiful,” in “God Bless America,” and in “My Country, ‘tis of Thee” we sing of skies, mountains, prairies, farmlands, woods, and wilderness. Even Woody Guthrie’s atheistic rejoinder to these songs falls back on “This Land,” in vibrant detail, as the best thing about America. These songs celebrate over and over the place where the American story played out in all its glory and confusion. This country is a beautiful country. Growing up in Rabun County taught me that, and even without the sight of the mountains during the day or the sounds of a creek to lull me to sleep at night, I have found great beauty where I live now. Beautiful places are tucked away here and there by the thousands all over America. But you can’t find them sitting in front of a TV or doomscrolling through a newsfeed or chipping in your two cents’ worth in the latest Twitter kerfuffle. We were designed and created to live in the physical world, with each other, face to face, breathing the same air. So my hope this Independence Day is that more people will break free of their cable news or their social media or their preferred political candidates for the real world, and that they’ll get out into the country and see it unfiltered, honestly, and with each other. And if we purpose within ourselves to love our country for what it is, because it’s ours, maybe we’ll also start loving each other for what we are. That’s the best I can hope for. I am, after all, not a history teacher first and foremost, but a country boy.