America: Love it or Like it
Are you in love with America or is it just a summer fling? This weekend, The Lady Logician takes a long, hard look at this question as she examines a recent column by Joel Stein. The L.A. Times piece seeks to continue the culture wars in America by addressing the question of whether or not conservatives love our country more than liberals do. I don’t much care for blatant generalizations about “The Left” or “The Right” and what they do or don’t do, as if they were each some sort of monolithic, homogeneous block of matchstick men who stand ready to be popped into pigeon holes, but the column and Cindy’s analysis are well worth a look.
(For purposes of full disclosure, the Logical One is also my radio partner and tosses me a nice shout-out in the essay.) At one point, Cindy is addressing some of Stein’s favorable comments about other countries as compared to the good old U.S. of A. and expresses her pity and anger for the author.
Pity because again, he just doesn’t get it. Love is not nuanced – love is “I’ll lay down my life for you”, love is give up everything you have in order to be with that person or be in that place. True love never wonders if there is something better out there! Those of us who have been overseas, we have been to these places that you admire so much and we are able to see the good, the bad and the indifferent in them. We go to these countries and we see people – hard working people who are doing whatever it takes to take care of their families and live life to the fullest – just like we do here. Anger because he just refuses to see this country in the same idealistic light he sees other countries in.
So, do I love my country? Were anyone to have the temerity to ask me, I suppose I would bristle a bit and respond, “Of course I love my country! I’m a veteran, for God’s sakes!” (For some reason we veterans seem to get a free pass on the question from both sides of the aisle. In reality, of course, we’re not much different from everyone else.) But Lady Logician’s essay gives me pause to examine the question a bit more deeply. Is it love? Am I in love with America? There’s a part of me that is tempted to say that I wasn’t very much in love with it on March 20, 2003. That was a day when my wife went outside, took down our American flag, folded it up and put it in the closet. But had I fallen out of love with the country? No. I just wasn’t particularly wild about the Commander in Chief we had put in office at the time.
Do we love the reality of our country, or are we in love with the idea of America? It’s easy to love the concept and the dream of a democratic republic such as ours. (It’s not actually a true, pure democracy, in case you’re wondering. Look it up some time.) But the day to day affairs of such an entity can often fall short of the ideal. For that matter, if we’re to be brutally honest here, it’s not that hard to fall in love with the theoretical concept of communism, either. Who wouldn’t like a society where everyone is contributing equally and assured of protection and security? Of course, the reality of communism is that it never works, falls apart in a few generations at most, and either breaks down entirely or morphs into a brutal state of oppression where nobody in their right mind would like to live. It’s just not a perfect universe, I’m afraid.
It was Brasidas of Sparta who once claimed that it was impossible to effectively rule more people than you could fit in a single room at one time. (In all fairness, old Brasidas also seemed to feel that it was impossible to effectively rule more people than you could line up at one time, tie to stakes, chop off a few limbs and set afire, so we may want to take that with a grain of salt.) But we soldier on with our representative form of government and our Bill of Rights and do the best we can. Is it perfect? No… nothing is. Is it the best I can imagine? I would have to say so. In fact, the system itself may well be damn near perfect. It’s just the human beings required to keep the wheels turning, with all of their warts and flaws, that seem to muck up the works all the time.
So, dear readers, (at least the ones living in the United States) do you love America? Are you in love with your country? Is your love somehow better or worse than somebody else’s, be they ever so liberal or conservative? Or should all of us in the punditry class just shut the heck up and let you get about the business of enjoying America as you see fit?
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6 Responses to “America: Love it or Like it”
Hmm…
Love is putting the good of another (the beloved) above one's own. The more completely this is done, the purer the love. Thus love is an act of the will; a decision and not an emotion or feeling.
One can't love a country in quite the same way as one can love individuals. A country is something of an abstraction and the United States is more of one than most countries.
So in what reasonable sense can one love one's country, specifically the US? Since love is a decision, we must know that what we are deciding to love is first of all worthy of love; ie lovable. Can a country be lovable? A country like the United States is primarily based on a shared approach to public life, best expressed in the Declaration of Independence. If you believe that the ideals expressed in that document are still relevant and are worthy of preservation then you can love this country, otherwise you can't and you won't.
Loving someone does not mean overlooking imperfections, even great ones. Love that is blind is not love but is rather denial. True love sees the beloved with crystal clarity and continues to love. It follows that no human can love perfectly; only God can do (and has done) that. But it also follows that a love that will only tolerate a certain amount of imperfection is also not love. It is selfish in that the so-called lover in effect demands that the beloved meet his own lofty standards in order to receive the mighty benefit of his approval.
Thanks for the good question.
[...] in the political process is an expression of their love of country, just as I assume that veterans of all political stripes serve from that same love of America. The difference between the two comes to whether they [...]
To paraphrase Jon Stewart, Conservatives love America but hate Americans.
I know this is very hard for some people–particularly liberals for some reason–to understand, but the United States is not the government. It's not a particular administration, and it's not the policies of a particular administration. Your wife was being silly when she put away the flag because she disagreed with the war. As a sensible liberal friend of mine said years ago when the Vietnam War was dividing people, she still flew the flag proudly because, “It's my flag too!”
Yes, I love the country. I love it without reservation. I may disagree with certain policies of the government in power, but that's not the same thing.
Brainster
In fact its not hard for us liberals to understand at all. We can love our country but hate our elected officials– no problem there. But we are not going to walk around carrying signs that say “my country right or wrong”– we try to influence our government to do what we think is right, and condemn those the country has elected who still do the wrong thing despite that.
The old proverb claims: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” This is true for individuals, and it's true for one's homeland. After living overseas several years, coming back to the U.S. was emotional. There's nothing like extended time away to make one realize just how unique this place really is. Any Peace Corps volunteer working in the developing world ill tell you the same. You grow to appreciate the people of your host country, and the daily hardships they face about which we know nothing. A poor person here seems unbelievably rich when you've seen the truly destitute in other places.