Yes. And frankly, I immediately lose respect for people who aren't. My country isn't just maple leafs and lumberjacks; it's the people who live here and help make Canada great. Same goes in the US. To me, denouncing patriotism is to denounce your neighbour, your friends, your family, and, in many cases, your ancestors. No one person is better than the collective.
What?
I just mean that patriotism, to me, is about more than the abstract consumer icons. In the US, the hicks who wear eagle shirts with stars and stripes aren't necessarily more patriotic than the people who don't.
Yes. And frankly, I immediately lose respect for people who aren't. My country isn't just maple leafs and lumberjacks; it's the people who live here and help make Canada great. Same goes in the US. To me, denouncing patriotism is to denounce your neighbour, your friends, your family, and, in many cases, your ancestors. No one person is better than the collective.
Denouncing patriotism is not denouncing your neighbor, friends, family, or ancestors. It's denouncing the civic religion that says I have more in common with an American one percenter than I do a Canadian 99 percenter, which is ludicrous not just from a modern vantage point, but the entire history of both our countries. Patriotism is a civic religion that helps the one percenters obscure the actual conflict in society that exists between them and everyone else. It tells us to hate the foreigner we struggle alongside, but love the parasite who has the same skin color or speaks the same language that we do. There is nothing wrong with loving where you hail from or honoring local traditions; but there is something else at play entirely when those acts are elevated to the status of untouchability and used as a means of attacking and denouncing other people because they don't hail from the same place on the map that you do.
Being proud of who you are, embracing where you come from, and feeling kinship with your fellow countrymen does not preclude you from being a good global citizen. My patriotism doesn't teach me to hate and it doesn't come with the stipulation that I must more closely identify with a Canadian billionaire than an American prole. Sure, patriotism can be manipulated and perverted by the people in power, but so can the kinship you're talking about between members of the working class. In fact, we've seen it happen on countless occasions.
You're dealing in extremes because it suits your extremism. For me, it's separate from politics. Celebrating one of the things that unites us isn't inherently bad.
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