Patriotism

If I had the gumption to write a piece about how I feel about America, I really hope that I would do it right, and write something as good as this.

It's a hard subject for someone in college, because declaring yourself a patriot carries the inherent implication that you somehow approve or disprove of some current event, or that said event is the basis for your patriotism. I don't think anything could be further from the truth. Love of country is like love of anything else; if it's based on the short-term, what-has-it-done-for-me considerations, it's not really love. But since love is a concept that humanity has as yet failed to really articulate, I'm going to leave it there.

Where that article talks about the pursuit of happiness, I'm right there with it. There's a certain degree of outright insanity that has to be tolerated for people to chase their dreams, and in this country, that insanity is accepted as a matter of course. To chase after hard things to grab, like pants-wettingly satisfying jobs or mountains of money or astronomical achievements, a certain degree of reason-defying megalomania is required. And here, that's okay. And we only call it insanity among the people who didn't pull it off; the people who do are called "visionaries".

I'm in love with this country because it offers me a very wide latitude of pursuit; wider than most other places, and I have used that extra width on a number of occasions. And then, still had the wherewithal to come back and try something else. That's a big deal, and it doesn't happen in most places. When people talk about how unforgiving of error that the US system of government and economics is, they generally forget that much of the world knows cruelty in ways that even hard-done Americans can't really relate to.

But for the most part, I take it on faith that we're awesome. I don't think about it a lot because I don't feel like I need to. It's obvious, it's there for everyone to see. It's one of my more solid basic assumptions. It doesn't say anything else about anyone else, because it's not "America is awesome and everyplace else blows". Just that America is awesome, and I love it. I don't need to do any introspection to know that we ought to defend our ideals and the principles that we've built the nation on. Of course we should.

And, to be completely honest, having that whole idea figured out frees up a lot of time for me to think about other things. Like which five Disney movie characters would make the best drinking buddies. But that's my next post.