Patriotism?

I must admit that patriotism has always baffled me. Sometimes it has even revolted me. The *feeling* of patriotism has never risen spontaneously in my breast, even as a youngster reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning before school began. The abstract concepts of “indivisibility” and “liberty” struck no chord, aroused no emotion. Even then, these ideas had little to do with my reality, made no reference to the smell of construction paper or the sound of chairs scraping the linoleum on the class-room floor, had nothing to do with the small loves, rivalries, sorrows of my childhood. They had nothing to do with the aroma and warmth of my home, my mother’s constant quiet happiness, her presence. Had nothing to do with pine-sap stuck to the heel of my hand.

I didn’t love my country—or didn’t think I did—until I lived in another country. Suddenly I felt an absence, I yearned for something, the “genius” of my homeland, for lack of a better word. And I was surprised to find that the “genius” was not, after all, the ideas that supposedly define our nation—not “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Not “freedom”—whatever that is. The “genius,” the enervating spirit of my country was, in reality, more like a local diety, a household god. Something mysterious, but most importantly local, concrete, related to the land, rooted in place and the particulars of place.

I was homesick. But I didn’t want “America”—if such a place exists. I wanted Wyandotte Road, I wanted the white pine in our back yard, whose habit and branches I knew. I wanted wheat-fields bleached in late June along I35. I wanted Strong City, Kansas. I wanted ash trees full of singing cardinals, dusty sparrows on the sidewalk in Brookside. I wanted cicadas droning in July. I wanted the faces of my parents and the rooms where I was a child.

As usual, Wendell Berry says it better:

In my teens, when I was away at school, I could comfort myself by recalling in intricate detail the fields I had worked and played in, and hunted over, and ridden through on horseback—and that were richly associated in my mind with people and with stories. I could recall even the casual locations of certain small rocks. I could recall the look of a hundred different kinds of daylight on all those places, the look of animals grazing over them, the postures and attitudes and movements of the men who worked in them, the quality of the grass and the crops that had grown on them. I had come to be aware of it as one is aware of one’s body; it was present to me whether I thought of it or not.

Patriotism, I think, must be this: this local love rooted and growing in a particular home, rather than an abstract idea imposed upon a place. This is the only way we can even begin to serve or even love our country, because it is, first and foremost, our mother and our home.

"When I have thought of the welfare of the earth," Berry writes,

the problems of its health and preservation, the care of its life, I have had this place before me, the part representing the whole more vividly and accurately, making clear and more pressing demands than any *idea* of the whole. When I have thought of kindness or cruelty, weariness or exuberance, devotion or betrayal, carelessness or care, doggedness or awkwardness or grace, I have had in my mind’s eye the men and women of this place, their faces and gestures and movements.