Patriotism

In response to Patriotism by kathrynknight:

I said the pledge of allegiance everyday before school when I was growing up. I have a picture that was taken of me when I was five saying the pledge in front of my grandparent's house on July 4th. I was standing with my grandfather with my hand over my heart looking up at the flag. I appreciate that other people in our town have their flags out as well during special holidays and events. I feel that parts of our country are either loosing their patriotism or refuse to participate all together. There are so many people that don't vote. I really feel that there is no excuse. If you don't vote, then your political opinion doesn't count for anything. All citizens should love their homeland and outwardly express their patriotism.... the very least of which is to vote.
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Unfortunately, patriotism is too often held ahead of civic involvement. People who expend more time and energy debating national elections, and then conducting rhetorical post-mortems of those elections for years after, than they do participating in local elections and community organizations, all out of patriotic love for their country--whether as conservative patriots who wave the flag or liberal patriots who use the flag in protest--have no excuse for the problems they would look to national figures to fix for them.

Patriotism is secondary to individual worth. Individuals who embrace their own worth don't expect people hundreds of miles away to fix problems for them. People who rely on their own value and power as human beings allow neither national allegiance nor social justice to overshadow engagement with one's neighbors and involvement in the political life of one's own community.

This is the ethic of barn raising, given expression today in neighborhood watch programs, parent-teacher associations, community planning meetings, and yes, voting in local elections. Before patriotism comes what Robert Pirsig calls gumption:

My personal feeling is that this is how any further improvement of the world will be done: by individuals making Quality decisions and that's all. God, I don't want to have any more enthusiasm for big programs full of social planning for big masses of people that leave individual Quality out. These can be left alone for a while. There's a place for them but they've got to be built on a foundation of Quality within the individuals involved. We've had that individual Quality in the past, exploited it as a natural resource without knowing it, and now it's just about depleted. Everyone's just about out of gumption. And I think it's about time to return to the rebuilding of this American resource--individual worth. There are political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real individual worth and not just an excuse for giving money to the rich, they're right. We do need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance, and old-fashioned gumption. We really do.

-- Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance (1974)

Patriotism without gumption, without engagement in governance of one's own community, is empty nationalism, that no speeches about social contracts or jingoistic saber-rattling can fill. Gumption, by contrast, is the characteristic Lao Tsu was speaking of when he wrote of leaders:

True leaders
are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders
the people know and admire;
after them, those they fear;
after them, those they despise.
To give no trust
is to get no trust.
When the work's done right,
with no fuss or boasting,
ordinary people say,
Oh, we did it.

-- Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching (rendered by Ursula K. LeGuin)

Gumption, not patriotism, is the stuff of true leaders, of true patriots, those who at the end of the day heartily agree when their neighbors say, "Oh, we did it." This is the lesson taught by the three soldiers in the story of Stone Soup we all read as children. To be hardly known, yet contribute that which we each are best able to contribute, to trust and to do the work right. It is in this way that ordinary people build extraordinary nations, one community at a time.