Catharine Stimpson in The Ideas Letter:
On Christmas Eve, 2016, three grandmothers made a late afternoon pilgrimage to a small pizza place on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. On previous visits, they had walked with their grandchildren down the Avenue to eat pizza and pasta there. Now their visit had a different purpose: For unfathomable reasons, the quiet and friendly restaurant had become the object of a vile conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, which baselessly alleged that children were being held in the basement of Comet. After the conspiracy spread across the Internet, a man showed up with a gun. Fortunately no one was killed, and the owners, unbowed, had insisted on staying open for the community. The grandmothers wanted to thank the owners and staff of Comet Ping Pong for having survived the onslaught of disinformation and the assault by an armed vigilante.
I was one of the grandmothers. The transition from President Obama to President-elect Trump had unsettled all three of us. Both onslaught and assault were baleful warning signs of a recrudescence of past dangers and future dangers to come. As such, they offended my patriotism. They still do.
My patriotism has deep roots. I was a child during World War II. In my small hometown in the Pacific Northwest, we grew silent when we passed a Gold Star Mother banner in a window. We wept, cheered, and threw confetti in 1945 when America and the Allies won. My father came home alive. America was beautiful and majestic and justly powerful.
Since 1945, I have had an immense amount to unlearn about “my” America. Genuine inquiry corrodes naivete. I have had to dive into the American wreck and, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail.”
More here.
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