Learning to Love Patriotism Again as Jimmy Carter Turns 100

IIn 2017, I traveled with my two teenage children from Jacksonville, Florida to Plains, Georgia to hear Jimmy Carter teach Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church.

My son Gibson requested this trip to celebrate his 17th birthday. A passionate and unusual admirer of the Carter presidency, he had recently written a high school history paper on the Jimmy Carter administration and the rise of arch-conservatism, and we were all shocked by Donald Trump's “massacre-like” inaugural address that month.

The three of us spent an idyllic Saturday wandering around Plains, visiting Carter's childhood home and peanut farm, his brother Billy's gas station, and the train depot that became the 1975 presidential campaign headquarters. We stood as a Southern family at the Carter Visitor Center, housed in the high school where the future president and first lady were students. We admired Carter's Nobel Peace Prize and took photos of him sitting at a replica of his Oval Office desk. As we wandered from exhibition to exhibition, it was easy to slip back into 1976.

I was ten years old and living in Jacksonville that year when the American Bicentennial became pervasive in everything – television, magazines, clothing, commemorations this and that. Not only coins, spoons and the like, but our Avon lady could give us perfume in one Sell ​​bottles that look like Betsy Ross with the flag sewn on them, or soaps that have the likeness of George and Martha Washington printed on them. I could rummage through the Cheerios box to snag early copies of the Stars and Stripes stickers, or send them off to get a bicentennial-themed scratch-and-sniff coloring book with my Applejacks.

It felt like a patriotic party to which the entire country was invited. I was totally into it. As my mom always said about me: You're not happy unless every day is a parade, and for once it felt that way.

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And I was one very I'm a serious kid—as evidenced by my own way of celebrating the bicentennial, which included learning military anthems, memorizing the Gettysburg Address, and staging a vaudeville show on the carport of our cinderblock home. My best friend played Thomas Jefferson and I was Ben Franklin, our pant legs awkwardly tucked into our knee socks so it looked like we were wearing jodhpurs. The most remarkable thing about the whole thing wasn't that the neighborhood kids actually showed up, but that no one made fun of us, at least not to our faces.

But I was most proud of the four poems I wrote in honor of our country's birthday that won me the Girl Scouts of Northeast Florida regional talent show at Camp Kateri. This was no easy task as my competitors included a girl who played “One Tin Soldier” on her flute and another who performed a karate routine to the song “Kung Fu Fighting.”

But it wasn't just the bicentennial that filled me with patriotism.

A southern peanut farmer, from the same state as my father's family since the 1700s, was running for president.

And his appeal went deeper than his familiar tone. Although Jimmy Carter was deeply religious, he did not come across as a judge. When he spoke, it was with steady calm and good-natured intelligence. I felt inexplicably proud, as if he and his family were our wealthier relatives.

I lay in bed that year and dreamed of scenarios in which our paths would cross, like if the Carter campaign came to Jacksonville and we were chosen as the average American family to spend an evening with. Since we both wore glasses and loved to read, I knew his daughter Amy and I would hit it off, maybe over a game of Parcheesi, and before you knew it I'd be flying to the White House to spend the night.

I found it disappointing that despite all of my perceived similarities, my father still didn't vote for him. But in our fifth-grade election, I did it—probably my first act of rebellion against my father. Still, I remember Dad proclaiming that he was happy to finally see a southern man on TV who wasn't portrayed as an idiot all the time.

I can't pinpoint exactly when my understanding of what it means to be patriotic took on a completely different meaning.

I felt it in 1979 when conservative Christians organized themselves into constituencies. I also felt it in the “Republican Revolution” of 1994 when Newt Gingrich unveiled his Treaty for America, and definitely in 2009 when the Tea Party was in turmoil over Obama. When Trump became president in 2016, it seemed as if the Republican Party had completely abandoned patriotism and much of Christianity.

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When January 6th happened, I thought to myself that the idea of ​​patriotism could never again mean what it once did. Instead of a shared pride, it was seething with anger and a desire for control.

But on that day in Plains in 2017, it was impossible not to feel patriotic in a nostalgic sense and not find “fresh faith in an old dream,” to quote President Carter himself.

The next day, as I sat in the pew with my kids while Jimmy taught us Sunday school and then had our picture taken with him and Rosalyn after church, the 10-year-old girl in me grinned like it was 1976 all over again. As Plains disappeared in the rearview mirror, I wondered if it was even possible that someone like him could ever become president again.

About eight years have passed since this pilgrimage. I remember this now because in the speeches that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz gave in Minnesota, Arizona, and Nebraska, I hear echoes of the same goals that Carter spoke of: “The test of government is not how popular “It is not the powerful and privileged few, but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who depend on it.” And of course also because Uncle Jimmy (as I respectfully and longingly call him) turns 100 on Tuesday and proof of this is that the good guys can still see the effects of their efforts around the world.

Even more than that day in the town of Plains, I have new confidence in this old dream that suddenly feels new again.