Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
- Howard Zinn*
I don't really like the word "patriotic." In the past, I've equated patriotism with blind loyalty to the country, going along with anything in the name of America. I still sometimes cringe when I hear the word. But, having read others' ideas about patriotism, I've realized that patriotism, like many words that are being tossed around easily today, cannot be easily defined. According to some people, despite my hatred toward the current administration and my adamant position against the war, I would be considered patriotic.
George Orwell once wrote "Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again. It is the fact that we are fighting a war, and a very peculiar kind of war, that may make this possible." When I first read that, I made a notation in the book: "Why?"
I couldn't see how patriotism and intelligence could come together, much less why they needed to. But, Orwell went further than that, and he differentiated between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, according to Orwell, is "devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life." Nationalism, on the other hand, is "the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests."
In other words, patriotism is devotion to ideas, and nationalism is devotion to power. A patriot loves the ideas of his or her country and will fight for them. A nationalist merely wants the country to be powerful, to be on top. An American patriot, then, would be a person devoted to democracy, equality, etc. And, according to Howard Zinn, "patriotism would require us to disobey our government, when it violated those principles."
If we are truly patriotic, we need to keep doing what we're doing. We need to keep fighting for our rights and for the rights of others. We need to fight back when we see our government doing something that we know is wrong. We do not need to be blindly devoted to whatever misguided ideas Bush has about freedom and democracy. We do not need to show our deep love of the American flag or the national anthem. These are things, they're merely symbols for ideas. And while conservative "patriots" may have co-opted those symbols, we still hold onto the ideas.
*Yes, Zinn said that, not Thomas Jefferson.