I'm reposting this from a message I wrote to a discussion forum about Nick Scipio's work. It's kind of related to my 2006 July 4th entry, but it's a little bit expanded from that because... well... it's a sentiment that my regular readers here on Flutterby probably know I have. Anyway, it was hung off a thread about flag desecration that started because of this picture, and it went something like this:
Subject: Re: [Scipio's Forum] POTD July 4
Date: Wed, 05 Jul 2006 08:38:14 -0700
From: Dan Lyke <danlyke@flutterby.com>
On Tue, 04 Jul 2006 19:35:11 -0700, jonathan wrote:
> People show their patriotism in different ways. I for one am very > proud of the 34 American heroes in the senate who saved from > desecration the freedom and liberty that the flag represents. > They understand what America is about. The shame is how rare > that's becoming.
I remember my shock the last time this issue came up, when I lived in the deep south. I thought me and a Rush Limbaugh quoting Vietnam vet friend of mine and I were going to have some heated discussions over the flag desecration political football in the moment, he took a deep breath, wound up, and started in with "It pisses me off that these pansies in Washington are willing to shit all over the Bill of Rights that I fought and killed for because they think that the ideals can be destroyed by someone messing around with a symbol. Well, they're right, 'cause they're messing around with a symbol and destroying those ideals."
There were times when John and I got along famously.
Beyond that, though, this seems a good place to hang a rant from yesterday.
I live in Northern California. You know the towns that the parents of John Walker Lindh, "The American Taliban" guy, live in, Fairfax and San Anselmo? Yeah, my residence is eight to eleven miles (respectively) west ("to the left") of those towns, over White's Hill and out in the San Geronimo Valley. While there was the usual spike in displayed flags immediately following September 11th 2001 in my area (I actually lived in Fairfax at that time), with the run up to the Iraq invasion those flags disappeared. I mean, gone. And we have groups that stand on the side of the road with "pull the troops out now" signs, one in Fairfax on Thursday night, one in San Geronimo on Sunday mornings, etc.
But this isn't a rant about that, that's just setting the scene.
Yesterday we got on one of our tandem bicycles and rode the six miles or so over to the Woodacre 4th of July parade. It's fun in a small-town way, the local horse clubs get all dressed up, neighborhoods build floats, the little ones pedal along in a "Tykes(sic) on Bikes" (we aren't that far from San Francisco...) section, the local civic organizations march. And it's preceded by a pancake breakfast at the firehouse and followed by a Lion's club barbecue, so it's kind of a day when the whole darned valley (the whole several thousand of us residents that live along this eight or nine mile stretch of fault-line) turns out.
Someone in the crowd commented at the quantity of the flying flags on the various vehicles and floats in the parade that they "weren't used to seeing this much patriotism in the valley". And I was taken aback, because nowhere else that I've lived have I seen as much community involvement in government, and isn't that "patriotism"? So it got me to thinking.
If we take "patriotism" as cognate with "patriarchal", then, yeah, there ain't a whole lot of "for the Fatherland, right or wrong!" sentiment out here. But if we take "patriotism" to mean a belief and involvement in a government that truly serves the community, then this is the most patriotic place I've ever lived.
Part of that is that we're semi-rural, unincorporated in a county full of towns that provide their own sets of services, and if we don't do it it doesn't happen. The school needs a new gym, and a lot of people, kids or not, show up for the fundraisers for that. The school board meetings are well attended. The road we live on needed re-paving, and it was a group of the residents on that road who were out looking at options, getting estimates, and in some cases offering to do much of the work.
And, of course, we went to a disaster planning meeting that some group put on and I was rather taken aback when they were talking about procedures for checking on your neighbor, "In the event of an earthquake or similar disaster, go to the two houses on either side of you, announce yourself as your local disaster services liason, knock, ...", and I was thinking "uhhh... bang on the door and holler 'John, Diana, you guys okay?'".
However, it goes further. If I wanted the ear of at least my U.S. Representative, I'd go talk to a neighbor and say "Hey, Pete, I need to get in touch with Lynn".
My street has its own political action mailing list. If you count things like road repaving, two of 'em.
In terms of civic involvement this is *the most* patriotic place I've ever lived.
Government is not a service we buy, it's a process we participate in. Many of us in my generation have forgotten this, and in outsourcing our government we've allowed a lot of the process to go wrong. As long as we treat it as a service, we've no standing for complaining when it's provided to us as a service, just as the Coca Cola corporation provides us soft drinks that may not be terribly healthy for us but taste good at the time.
We can allow "patriotism" to mean "patriarchal", ie: someone else knows what's good for us, and take what we're given. But that's not really patriotic, that's not *believing* in your country any more than drinking a Coke is *believing* in Coca Cola. Patriotism, and maybe we need a new word for this, is being involved in the processes, in taking responsibility for your own self first.
Because waving a flag has very little correlation with making our collective endeavors work.
Comments to this front page entry or pop on over to Orange is Holy - On patriotism, the link for which I put this up.