Cubic light years of real and virtual ink has been, is, and will continue to be “spilled” about patriotism. Since the United States is celebrating it’s 250th birthday, that makes sense. I was deeply embedded in celebrations of the nation’s 200th birthday in 1976, and there wasn’t a big enough rock on the planet to hide under to avoid being aware of that….

I’ve written at length in various other spots on this blog and elsewhere about the squirmy and fluid attributes of language, and certain words – which in some contexts I’ve designated “weasel words” – are particularly susceptible to this attribute. Patriotism is one of the biggies.

Some background: I am a retired U.S. Navy veteran. Embedded in those military years is a period of time when I was in college and not in the Navy – when I served in the National Guard. I was in some sort of military from 1973 through 1996. I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything, and it played a big part in how I think of patriotism. I was nowhere near any kind of “front lines”. I was a Musician in the Navy and a Personnel Administrator in the National Guard, so firmly in the support and back office roles. Still, as was demonstrated in the Bible by how David treated the people in his community in the field before he was crowned king, the folks who didn’t go out to battle the foe but instead stayed behind and maintained the home base were as valuable as the warriors. There were no second-class occupations in his group. I got to play concerts for a lot of people in those years, many military and many public, that played a positive role in a number of different activities and events. I am pleased to have served.

So, what DOES patriotism mean to me? Good and interesting question. Once again, a problem is language. I have to use language to describe language, which is self-referential, and may not be really helpful. However, sometimes thinking of the word as a many-faceted jewel and using other language constructs to describe different angles of the gem can give a slightly more clear view of what I feel when I think of patriotism.

There’s another issue with language, by the way. In the particular case of the word “patriotism“, much of what composes my definition are feelings, perceptions, and wickedly-difficult-to-describe apprehensions. Arising from emotions, they become even more difficult to articulate. So, if this only gets muddled instead of clarified, I hope you grant me a little slack!

My baseline feeling about being a patriot is one of humility, and a mix of comfort and discomfort about my country’s aspirations and history.

The thing about aspirations is just that: they are aspirations – they are where you want to go. Principles towards which we orient who we want to be. I don’t feel that any of the Founders could have looked around when they wrote the founding documents and debated them in the late 18th century and said with any kind of credulity that what they were putting to parchment was “the way things are“. Good grief, NO!

The thing about history is that it happened. It is impossible to record all of any moment. History, therefore, is a slimmed down recording of something that happened. This something happened in the context of a particular moment with any number of different people and forces, none of which we are truly privy to. This recording is subject to a huge number of interpretations. I won’t go into all of the factors that influence that. Needless to say, since humans are involved, universal agreement on the interpretation of a moment in history is impossible.

So, aspirations and history…

For example, when they wrote that all men are created equal, while true as a statement of Being, it was a long way off of the implementation or actualization as a central tenet. It still is. What does that statement imply for government, law, culture, and business policy, let alone how we treat each other? We’re still working through it, sometimes more on the “discussing and convincing” side, sometimes more on the “banging each other on the head” side. The former is more civilized, but we Americans can be just as beastly as anyone else, especially to those close to and around us. Sadly, we don’t seem to have progressed as far on that front as many of us would have liked, but we keep trying. Americans can be a remarkably stubborn lot.

We get some things right. We get some things wrong. We always have and always will.

Be humble about our general fallibility and grateful for the bits that worked out for everyone. Patriotism can be the recognition of our Greater Community and not the creation of “Us vs. Them“. Remember the opening salvo from the Founders – “We the People“

We are we.