What should Patriotism logically be? I think it should mean a desire to see your neighbors do well, whoever they are. To see the children of your community fed, educated, and able to dream about reaching ever-higher. To want your air and water to be clean. To be able to live your life in peace, and to wish the same for the other people in your community, no matter what their skin color is, how they do or don’t worship, or who they love. To have, in all ways, the best possible community for the biggest number of people. And I think that we may have different ideas about how to get to that kind of a place, but it should be the place we all want to go.
But those aren’t the ideas that the people who style themselves “Patriots” have. Those people want to force you to live by their dictates. They will tell you where you must go to church, and they’ll make sure that “church” comes to you by codifying their dogmas into law. They will tell you that you must adhere to public rituals that they will define for you. They will separate you into different castes based on things like skin color, nationality, belief system. And if you are a woman, they will dictate to you how you will live your life, whether or not you have access to birth control, and of course you will not be allowed to ever terminate a pregnancy, even if the likely outcome of that pregnancy is your death, the death of your baby, or the death of both of you. And it may well be your death, since they also don’t want anyone to pay to have any access to healthcare. And for the children? In this day and age, as I sit here and type this, the “patriots” are openly suggesting that we scrap child labor laws, and return to an era where a lot of men died in their 30s due to the conditions they worked in as 12 year olds. Of course, we’ll all be dying younger anyway, from the chemicals that find their way into our water and the pollution-tainted food we eat. Nope, the only people who will be exempt from short, illness-plagued lives will be the ultra-rich. They, of course, will continue to enjoy access to the finest of everything.
Who in their right mind wants to live in such a place? Especially if you are a woman, or a person of color, or anything other than a fundamentalist Christian? Can you actually imagine being asked to fight and die to defend such a place? How could any thinking person be that kind of a “patriot?” I don’t think you can be. And I think the perversion of the word has largely led to the death of the entire concept. The Patriots that I recognized as a kid are belittled and shouted down in this day and age. Men like John McCain, who spent almost 5 years in a prison on behalf of his country. He is literally being asked to DIE on social media now by these so-called “patriots.” Oh, and those flag lovers don’t have any problem at all with a President who is very evidently compromised by a hostile foreign power, either. Hell, they ADMIRE that hostile foreign power, because it is the source of so much hate. If there’s one thing the so-called American “patriot” can’t get enough of in this era, that thing would be hate.
If you really love your neighbors, your family, the children of your community, and this land you live in, you can’t call yourself a Patriot anymore. You don’t want people 20 or 30 years from now referring to you with that title. Trust me when I tell you that it isn’t going to have a good connotation by then.