When times are good, it's easy for Americans to love the global economy. Some have argued that an emphatically political patriotism could perform the unifying function of nationalism while avoiding its perils. But there is much more to American patriotism than this, and we are in real danger of losing the shared sense of spirit and sacrifice that comes from remembering our past together.
Furthermore, they continued, those ideas are deemed to have a universal and all-encompassing quality; therefore, the defense of the United States is not
andrenjna126.over-blog.com merely the protection of a particular society with a particular regime and a particular culture and history, inhabiting a particular piece of real estate, whose chief virtue is the fact that it is "ours." Indeed, the fluid, voluntaristic, present-minded, and contractarian nature of American culture makes it a society built, in Werner Sollors's formulation, upon the value not of descent but of consent, meaning that every individual is created equal and is equally provided with the opportunity to give his assent to the values for which the nation stands.
It would be impossible to maintain that all moral obligations stop with national-borders. Nationalism is about power: its adherent wants to acquire as much power and prestige as possible for his nation, in which he submerges his individuality. Thanksgiving, a harvest celebration long held in Europe, was established as a National holiday by President Andrew Johnson in 1867, and is observed the last Thursday in November.
Large revolts were suppressed in 1925, 1930, and 1938, and the repression escalated with the formation of the PKK as a national liberation party, resulting in civil war in the Kurdish region from 1984 to 1999. In times of crisis, patriotism unites us. We put our differences aside to help our countrymen in need.
This tension between the nation as a cultural construct and the nation as a social group is what helps to explain a number of problems connected with national belonging that a certain section of every nation is contending with in contemporary Europe.
There is, of course, also a tragic dimension to patriotism, for it is not only about people's willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the "country" but about making a connection to those who have already made the "ultimate sacrifice". Real American patriotism should be about supporting each other and showing up to vote for (and be) leaders who take care of all of our communities.
A historical act of true patriotism was when Patrick Henry proclaimed his timeless cry "Give me liberty or give me death." Henry was a true American patriot who faced losing freedom in his beloved America, while it fought against England's rule in this new land.