Patriotism (Reimagined)

It is amazing how something that you read many years back can be read again today and mean something completely different. Today this spoke to me!

I think this is where I am today:

PATRIOTISM

"If patriots are people who stand by their country right or wrong, Germans who stood by Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich should be adequate proof that we've had enough of them.

"If Patriots are people who believe not only that anything they consider unpatriotic is wrong, but that anything they consider wrong is unpatriotic, the late Senator Joseph McCarthy and his backers should be enough to want to make us avoid them like the plague.

"If patriots are people who believer things like, 'Better Dead Than Red,' they should be shown films of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively, and then be taken off to the funny farm.

"The only patriots worth their salt are the ones who lover their country enough to see that in a nuclear age it is not going to survive unless the world survives. True patriots are no longer champions of any one country in particular, but champions of the human race. It is not the homeland that they feel called on to defend at any cost, but the planet earth as home. If in the interest of making sure we don't blow ourselves off the map once and for all, we end up relinquishing a measure of national sovereignty to some international body, so much the worse for national sovereignty.

There is only one sovereignty that matters ultimately, and it is of another sort altogether."

-Frederick Buechner "Beyond Words" (p299-300)


I'm sick of being called "unpatriotic" by this administration because I care enough to ask the tough questions and challenge my government. Perhaps my patriotism is not what should be in question as I exercise my rights as "we the people..." Perhaps my patriotism has been re-imagined!