I was thinking this morning, and properly so, about why I love America. Or rather, what I love most about America. It's hard to do this without ending up in a thicket of cliches, but there you are. Besides, cliches are cliches not because they are untrue, but because they are overly familiar, and tend to be mistaken for the whole truth. So I tried to remember what I thought and felt on 9/11 and the days and weeks following, when, like many of you no doubt, my true feelings about my country emerged from beneath the palimpsest of irony, sentimentality and other ersatz feelings. It seemed to me then that I loved America in part because it stands for an astonishing experiment in the dismal history of mankind: an attempt, mostly successful, by people to live in liberty, and to govern themselves. It is an attempt, mostly successful, to ensure that every man is equal before the law, and that big men stand a reasonable chance (though God knows not a foolproof one) of being brought to justice when they oppress little men. It is an attempt, rather less successful, but this has changed greatly in recent decades, to create an order in which people are judged not by their religion or race or class, but by the content of their character, and what they can do.
All these things are precious. If you spend any time overseas, or pondering the problems of most other countries in the world, you realize how stupendously amazing it is that such a thing as America was even attempted, much less got more or less right, though we must continue to improve.
All of that is why I love America. But that is not the main reason I love America. The main reason is simple -- so simple that I didn't realize it until 9/11.
I love America because she is mine.
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My wife and I had this very conversation yesterday, on the way to the fireworks stand.
She said that she didn't much like "nationalism," saying that it led to an "us against them" mentality, war, etc., but that she loved America because of the beauty of its founding ideals. I said I loved America for those reasons, too, but that I had no problem being an American patriot simply because America is my own country.
I do not believe that regarding oneself as a "citizen of the world," and identifying oneself first and foremost as a human being rather than as a citizen of a particular country, are incompatible with patriotic feeling towards a particular country. Of course we shouldn't be for "our country, right or wrong." Our first duty is to the universal moral law. But that doesn't mean we can't also recognize bonds of love and duty to smaller, particular entities.
To analogize, although I recognize a duty to love my neighbor as myself, given the choice between helping out someone in my immediate family versus doing an equivalent favor for a stranger in Poughkeepsie, my first duty is obviously to the one closer to me. How does the saying go -- "think globally, act locally"? Or "if any man provide not for his own, he is worse than an infidel"?
I know more than a few people who love Humanity in the abstract, but are complete [bleeps] to individual human beings. Patriotism is simply recognizing that one has degrees of identity between "humanity" and "me." Family is one; country is another. There are probably more; be true to your school, etc.
As for whether "nationalism" is a pernicious force: Though wars have been fought for nationalistic reasons, people don't need nationalism to brutalize or otherwise oppress each other. There have been plenty of tyrannical empires based on other foundations than the nation-state. Communism, in particular, was such a tyranny that purported to transcend petty nationalistic concerns. A fine lot of international peace and brotherhood we got from that.
In a case where one's country is clearly in the wrong, a true patriot's duty may be to oppose it. The German officers who tried to kill Hitler in 1944 were a good example of this. On the other hand, international controversies aren't always so clear-cut. In a case where the equities of a matter are too close to call, I see absolutely nothing wrong in taking your country's side, simply because it's your own country.
"... how stupendously amazing it is that such a thing as America was even attempted, much less got more or less right..." Rod
Well, Rod, we got it more or less right because of Intelligent Design.
Our more or less Christian founders who designed our amazing democratic republic knew that we would be able to keep it only to the extent that we kept our spirituality. From that flows what we all love-- justice and freedom--which are not human constructs. Might makes right and to the strongest go the spoils are human governing constructs that would be the rule without the ID installed at our founding.
Just as it was at the founding of the universe. :-)
I love America (particularly from 1954 to the present) because it is the only country in the world that gives a woman like me the freedom and independence that I have.
Pluralism (as opposed to multiculturalism) is one of the greatest ideas ever invented, and it can go along quite well with "E Pluribus Unum," thank you. My definition of pluralism is that each of us is allowed to have many identities, but we are united by a single identity, which is our status as American citizens.
Also, I thank God for immigrants from other countries, who have continuously freshened our culture with new ideas, cultures and customs. My maternal Grandfather emigrated from Norway, and I thank God for a country in which his granddaughter, my mother, can listen to Lou Dobbs and complain about Hispanic immigrants, and I am free to disagree with her.
I love America because she afords the average person a way to reach goals only imagined in most other countries.
She is , also, the model to look at by other countries so they can achieve the same things.
She has her warts and blemishes, but someone is always trying to correct those to make things better.
As long as mankind makes bad choices, some other man will have to figure out a way to stop the offenders.
AVB
Of course Straigth white Christians love America, you are the ones that make it so hard for everyone else to love it.
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