Oddly, many Americans
praise military service as personal sacrifice in defense of our country and
then rail against the same national government that operates the military as
though Washington, D.C, were the seat of a foreign and oppressive regime.
If patriotism
is the love for our country, does it also extend to the love of our fellow
Americans in a context other than just national defense?
I argued in
Chapter 4 of American Ways that
Americans historically have loved private communities, but have always
distrusted public communities. So often
Americans have viewed private communities as “us” and public communities as
“them.” This attitude is apparently a
legacy of the American Revolution and the Anti-Federalists who opposed the
ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
It may also be a legacy of slavery and the Civil War, depending upon
whose side one supported.
Private communities consist of churches,
neighborhoods, teams, clubs, fraternal orders, and societies. We express our individual freedoms in
selecting our participation in them and agreeing to cooperate with others in
the same social organizations. On the
other hand, public communities are schools, governments, and the military. What a paradox! We express our loyalty to our country through
military service, yet we distrust all forms of public communities, which
includes the military.
The national
government in Washington, D.C., is the long-lived institution of our national
community. As founded by the
Constitution of 1787 and as periodically amended, the Federal government serves
all Americans regardless of state residency, social and economic position, race
and color, gender, and personal preferences and lifestyle. When we abide by Federal laws and court
rulings, vote, express our views to our elected representatives, provide
emergency relief, and respect the rights of other individual Americans, are we
not also expressing our patriotism?
© 2017 Stephen M. Millett. All rights reserved.
I think there might be another way to look at it. Of the private communities you mention most can be self-selecting. They can choose (or think they can choose) who can, and cannot, be a member. The public communities have fewer restrictions on who's in and who's out. This self-identification is naturally going to make the private communities more closely knit than the public communities.
ReplyDeleteIn both collections of groups, some of the most intense conflicts come when the government, typically in the form of a court, forces the community to include a new group of people. Blacks in schools, Jews in private clubs, gays & lesbians in the military, and so on.
It's the ability to define who's part of the tribe and who isn't part of the tribe that makes identifying with that tribe easier or harder. And when the tribe is defined in ways that you may not personally agree, it's that much more difficult to embrace as your own.