On Patriotism

What with today being the Fourth and the current moronic political debate on whether each candidate is sufficiently patriotic, I thought that I would sit down, enjoy my first of what will prove to be many beers, and lay down my thoughts on the matter. I claim no moral or intellectual superiority on the subject, just that it seems everyone has their own definition and I wanted to put mine, for what it is worth, out there.

The thing that makes the origin of the United States special is what bound the nation together at its birth. We were not born of geographical boundaries, or a common language or religion or clan affiliation or some army telling us so. What this nation was based upon was a set of ideas that when commonly shared, formed a union that would willfully submit to government on the condition that the government would guarantee certain rights and consequently, the right of the people to cast off any government that does not. Jefferson’s remarkable eloquence condensed Democracy and a people’s right to it down to two sentences.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

We are a nation comprised of people from literally every corner of this planet, and in the case of Tom Cruise, others, and yet we are bound together by this notion that individual freedom trumps state power. That rights of the common man are equal to or even greater than those of King, Doge, Pasha, Sultan, Emperor, General, or Chief Executive Officer. That may seem unremarkable now but a couple hundred years ago, this was beyond radical. And that, to my mind, is the kernel of patriotism. That we are to be free of overzealous and intrusive authority; if you believe that and are willing to stand for it, then that in my book is patriotism. I don’t care what is on your lapel.

What patriotism is not is blind allegiance to the flag or boorish declarations of our greatness while unwilling to face up to our nation's flaws. America, on balance, has been a force for good in our relatively short existence. We have inspired a wave of liberty that has brought freedom to so many people. We have cured diseases, pioneered giant advances in technology, and secured other nations in times of war, famine, etc. The world is a better place today because our Founding Fathers laid down a marker and said this is what must be in order to create a more perfect union.

But that is the thing, isn’t it; the more perfect union. When our nation was born the word men meant white guys that owned land. For the first 90 odd years of our national existence, slavery was legal and we had to fight a war to end it. The next 100 or so years, those slaves and their descendants lived in a de facto apartheid state. Women could not vote until 1920. We have backed authoritarian governments for our own interests and ignore many a crisis for the sake of convenience or simple indifference. And let us not forget that to create this nation, we affected one of the worst genocides this planet has seen. And don’t get me started on MTV.

We are not a perfect union. We never were. But to me, a patriot recognizes our shortcomings, learns from our failures, and then wants to fix them. And that is why I am proud to be an American. We are a people that no matter how flawed, we are ever hopeful that we can, someday, get it right. We strive to perfect the union and we do improve it over time. In a nutshell, that is what I call patriotism. Knowing that this country has done a lot of good, done some bad as well, but loving it enough to always want to make it better.