What is Patriotism?

“What are you doing in the Navy?”

I’m not sure how many times I’ve been asked this question, by people both inside and outside the Navy. When it comes from outside the Navy, the question is polite and curious. When it comes from inside the Navy, it’s incredulous and often accompanied by a shaking head.

“You shouldn’t be here,” people tell me. “You have other options. You should be on Wall Street or something, making a lot of money.”

No one, it seems, is quite sure why the Harvard-educated philosophy major is running around in coveralls and a hard hat, squeezing behind piping to wipe away grease and climbing into the overhead to look for bubbles and verify airtight seals (I now have a roommate who graduated from Yale, so at least I’m not alone anymore).

A Different Perspective

It’s true that I don’t fit this mold particularly well, but that’s nothing new. It’s true that, after Harvard, the military is a very different environment, with different priorities, norms, and values. There are moments of jarring culture shock. It’s been a long time since I was surrounded by people who trust concealed carry but are suspicious of studying for enjoyment.

On the other hand, Harvard has its own quirks. I remember going to a Harvard alumni gathering a few months after I arrived in Florida. At one point the conversation turned to the use of the words “sir” and “ma’am” in the South and how uncomfortable they made everyone as a reminder of slavery. The lady across from me turned to me. “How do you feel about it?” I bit back a smile.

But in a way, culture shock is the point. I wanted out of the ivory tower. I wanted a new perspective, a new range of experience. I grow by throwing myself into new environments and learning how to cope and, eventually, how to succeed. After sixteen years of formal education, this was the biggest transition yet – and I can feel the growth.

Getting Your Hands Dirty

There is something about getting your hands dirty, literally dirty, that grounds you. You view with new eyes the report of deploying so many ships when you understand the stress and burden of long hours, constant work, and time spent away from home. You stop worrying about made-up issues when you see the real pain of the people around you, when you see the deaths in the family and the money problems and the DUIs and the arrests and the attempted suicides. It’s not that complicated. People are in pain. People need to be loved.

What is patriotism? I think it’s dangerous to make patriotism too theoretical. If we are fighting, not for what the country is, but for what we think it ought to be, we run the risk of destroying the actual people and place that we claim to love. There is no reality to check aspirations not grounded in hard experience. I don’t think we can love America only for what she stands for. I think we must love America herself, even with her imperfections.

Patriotism

We must love her for her spacious skies and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties before we love our patriot dream of alabaster cities. We must love her people as they are, full of selfishness and blind spots and bitterness and bad decisions, not because they are perfect but because they are people, our people, all of them together. We must love her cities, even if they be cramped and cold (and perhaps a little crazy), simply because they are ours.

It is from this love that our aspirations must spring, with love of individuals before love of ideals. It is not wise to want to make the country or the world a better place in the abstract. We must be making it better for someone, for each other. Before we love our ideals, we must love he who is their Source; before we love our country, we must love our neighbor. Upon this hang all the law and the prophets.

“American Flag” by William Warby is licensed under CC BY 2.0