My Country, Mine

I love my country. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say that anymore. I’m sure there’s a PC way of including the whole world in my proclamation. But that’s not what I mean at all. I love this country, the one I live in right now. I won’t even caveat it with the, “if only…would change.”

It’s not fair to add conditions. That’s not true love. And patriotism is a kind of love. It means standing up for something when you see it falling. It means coming to the rescue when it’s getting lost. Let’s be honest, this country is changing, has been changing. And sometimes that scares me.

It frightens me that laws need to be made about how I get to take care of myself, protect my family, educate my children. I get uncomfortable when government starts meddling in the most personal areas of my life, my thinking. Yet, I still love my country.

I can’t make statements about loving it more if there were different leaders, different laws, different people. Loving it means that in spite of the people in charge, I believe that change for the good can happen and I will continue to fight for that to happen. In the way I live, vote, teach my children what to value.

Without patriotism, we will lose the little we have left. There will be no one left to fight for our freedom, our democracy, our way of life. Patriotism isn’t about falling in and then out of love every time power changes, every time “they” do something of which we don’t approve. Patriotism is standing by your country through faults and failures because it’s worth fighting for what you love.