I Love You, America
I realize on this eve of Independence Day, that I should probably write some stirring definition of what patriotism means to me and how I think all the other guys are doing it wrong. I really can’t. I don’t see patriotism as a summer homework assignment and I think we’re all smart enough to know patriotism when we see it.
I don’t consider myself a patriot. I think the word has been so mangled by a hundred competing definitions that it, like so many others that used to be important to us, has no real meaning anymore. It means what we want it to mean and the definition that ends up in common usage is the one that gets yelled the loudest for the longest.
I will tell you this. I love my country. I love it as it is right at this very moment. I can not imagine how anyone can live here, look around them, and do otherwise. The very notion that someone living here in the United States of America could look at places like Haiti and North Korea and Zimbabwe and still summon contempt for the America we have here and now is alien to me. I don’t even bother trying to figure it out anymore. Those people are beyond my ken and I don’t care to understand why they wake up every morning in such a rage over a country that has given them more than they could ever get anywhere else.
I remember being eight years old, July 4, 1976 in the year of our Bicentennial. I and a few friends of mine were running around the side yard of my parent’s house waving sparklers and yelling “Happy Birthday America”. That year was not a great year for my country. We were barely clear of the stench of Vietnam and Watergate. We were about to enter the years of “malaise” under Jimmy Carter. Still, though, we kids knew enough to know that our country’s 200th birthday was a historic moment in the world. We knew that we were darned lucky to live here and we would not have traded places with kids in any other country in the world. We were Americans and we were proud of that. I still have that love inside me and there are times when I am so proud of America I can barely contain it.
Michelle Malkin has a post up asking us to tell the world why we’re proud of our country. Holy cow, folks, why am I proud of America? When I look back at our 232 years, when I see where we started and how far we’ve come and what we’ve accomplished as a people, do I really need to tell you why I’m proud? The greatness of my country is self-evident to me, and I’d think it would be so to anyone who can see farther than the end of their own selfishness and cynicism. We live in the greatest nation on the face of the earth. No country offers more freedom, more opportunity, more prosperity, more generosity, and more openness than the United States of America. No country has sacrificed more for complete strangers. None gives more when others are in need. None is as ready to spend the lives of its brave citizens to beat back the evil that continually threatens to overtake the innocent as America. No nation has put its very existence on the line to end the blight of slavery. None examines itself as closely as we do as often as we do.
How could you know even half of that and not be proud of America?
I’m no patriot. I just love my country the way it is, right here and right now. I think there are a lot more folks like me than we’re given to believe. I pray that that always remains so.
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Category: The Good Old US of A
That's a passionate love of country … thanks for sharing!
I remember the '76 4th of July….I was only 6 but I knew it was a big deal.
But of course, my favorite memory of that year was of the fireworks that once they blew off, a little statue of Evel Knieval would pop out with a parachute attached. They would slowing float to the ground & all the kids would try to catch them. I'm proud of a country that creates people like Evel Knieval.
"Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it."
-Mark Twain
"It seems that American patriotism measures itself against an outcast group. The right Americans are the right Americans because they’re not like the wrong Americans, who are not really Americans."
-Eric J. Hobsbawm
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
-Howard Zinn