It occurred to me today that an honest, humble patriotism would be preferable to what we have now.
I’ve written about my concerns for America in posts before, but I’ve recently had some pretty significant discussions with some close friends of mine, and I think that maybe one of our greatest problems is our patriotism.
Before you start screaming, “Hey, what’s wrong with patriotism?!?!”, let me explain.
Unfortunately, I think that the patriotism that is pretty prominent in America today is actually nationalism, in a philosophical sense. The philosophical term, ‘nationalism’, could be described as, “a belief in the supremacy of one nation –its culture, society, interests, etc.– above all other nations, and the promotion of that nation to the detriment of others.”
Patriotism is something else entirely. Patriotism doesn’t force itself on anyone, and patriotism is also not elitist. While patriotism may include a pride in one’s country and its way of life, it doesn’t pretend a supremacy over other countries or other ways of life. While patriotism is, by and large, defensive and unassuming, nationalism is predatory and antagonistic.
When I hear people talking about “America” and “patriotism” and “the land of the free”, and so on, they do it so aggressively these days that I can’t help but think that they aren’t being patriotic –> they’re being nationalistic. Before you start to wonder whether or not there’s really such a big difference, let me illuminate an example.
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There’s a sub-movement going on right now, in light of the recently heightened national awareness of racial injustices, to get Colin Kaepernick reinstated to the NFL and signed by an NFL team. For those of you who are unaware, Colin Kaepernick was a starting quarterback who protested police brutality and racial inequality during the 2016 NFL football season by sitting and/or kneeling during the National Anthem. Not long afterward, he found it hard to get a job because of the widespread disapproval of his actions.
If you want to start a fight among your family and friends, bring up Colin Kaepernick and kneeling during the national anthem and disrespecting the flag; that should do it. If I had a dollar for every person that I knew who, back in 2016, thought that Kaepernick was a jerk and/or an idiot and/or a traitor, I’d be taking us all out to dinner at a fancy restaurant.
I remember in 2016, when this was happening, I had black students in my classes that wouldn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance when we did it at the beginning of the school day, every day, either. They were not alone. Our school district, that serves a significant population of black students, drafted a policy to allow for them to “not pledge allegiance”.
But, I can’t say I blame Kaepernick, or those students of mine. Not one bit.
I think our nation, and its failures, deserve close scrutiny. I believe that any nationalism, that clouds the minds of the people so that they can’t see that we’ve got some serious problems to fix, is pretty dangerous. Any rabid love for the United States that would go so far as to deny our brokenness, both historically and currently, should have a light shone on it. I applaud Colin for saying, publicly, that he was not comfortable paying homage to a nation who treats its citizens —ANY of its citizens– poorly, as part of any systematic approach.
Anyone who loves this country must want it to be better than what it is, and right now, as Kaepernick tried to tell us, racism is still a problem. If you find anyone who says that they love this country, but they aren’t opposed to the racism that has been a part of this country’s history FOR WAY TOO LONG, then they don’t really love this country. True patriotism should include in it a desire for us to be better tomorrow than we were yesterday.
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When we understand that patriotism is modest and that nationalism is arrogant, you really only need to ask yourself this question, if you want to find out which mode our country has been stuck in lately: “Has our country, recently, been honestly looking at where we’re at, as a nation, to try to determine how we might make improvements?”
I don’t know about you, but I’m not interested in making sure that we keep the American experiment going, if that just means that we are going to try to postpone, for as long as possible, the horrible death of our democracy. We should be making progress, we should be advancing, we should be looking for new paths to continue to ensure that our nation has an identity and a way of life worth believing in. If America, and the people of America, aren’t going to take it upon themselves, as a nation, to improve our society, then we are just putting off the inevitable point in the future where we are finished.
But, here’s the kicker –> any process for making progress has to start with identifying our weaknesses, our failures, and our inadequacies. One of the most dangerous problems with nationalism is that it is so closely linked with pride and arrogance and conceit to be able to easily look itself in the mirror and say, “We’ve got a long way to go, still.”
I’ve always believed that there’s a cycle of unrest for our country, and it tends to happen every fifty or sixty years, if you look throughout our history; the people of this nation look around and are saddened/disgusted/outraged that no progress is happening. So, they instigate change and, for a while, things improve and progress occurs. But then, it’s almost as if we spend a certain amount of time making progress and then we get tired or bored or sick of it –so we stop. Then, the progress stops. And it only takes a certain amount of time after that for the new generation to look around and be saddened/disgusted/outraged that no progress is happening.
It also occurs to me that, maybe, there are events that coincide with these periods of progress, goads that lead to the outrage that lights the fire of progress. With the pandemic happening right now, and the national spotlight on police brutality and racism, you wonder if it just takes a little bit to shake people awake enough so that they look around and say, “Hey, things shouldn’t be this way.” Maybe the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam, in the sixties and seventies, shook people awake back then, as well.
I just wonder whether or not the overwhelming pride that you get these days from our current variant of patriotism is appropriate. Are we really the example that the world should follow? Have we really done such a great job handling our national responsibilities that we ought to think highly of ourselves? I don’t know about you, but I’m just as broken as the next guy/gal; I’m trying to handle my failings in my own agenda of progress.
It Occurred To Me Today 