Life is precious in God's eyes, whether it is yours or your neighbors. The meanings Lincoln was tapping into were part of the complex web of sentiments and ideals making up American national identity; all were valid, all were resonant. Flag emblems are a great way in which to customize your car and display your love for your country and with a wide range of great designs available, they can also be a stylish addition to your vehicle.
The only exceptions to this rule are for
Navy chaplains when they're conducting church services, and the flag display at the United Nations headquarters. Because we need a sense of national ego to remember what binds us together. Nationalism, on the other hand, is seen as a highly exclusive, prepolitical, culturally oriented attachment that is antagonistic to liberty.
It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it. (I have had such an experience.) A country is, among other things, a place, a language (one's mother tongue"), a way of life, and a set of institutions through which collective decisions are made and carried out.
Moderate nationalism is based on two main assumptions: (a) a nation-state 9 has an intrinsic moral value, (b) the nation-state is the best available form of government for societies that reflects the political will of their members (nation-states are not natural facts but a result of conscious action and people's common will) (Miller, 2004, pp. 321-350).
The result is a unique mixture of naivete and self-righteousness that true believers misconstrue as idealism and the world knows as "American patriotism". The kind of patriotism that the United States has brought into being is one of the bright lights of human history, and we should not allow it be extinguished by mere inattention or a perverse self-hatred, born of our colossal ignorance of history.
Up to this point, we have concentrated on the roles of nationalism and patriotism in affecting Chinese consumers' bias towards products characterised by a high degree of Chineseness. It can recount, too, the nation's mighty progressive tradition that has labored to bend the arc of history toward justice.
But in the course of the 20th century nationalism was deeply compromised. In delivering all his public speeches standing before a wall of American flags, for example, Bush is not only voicing what this patriotic symbol would have us do but using it to legitimate his own right to speak on its behalf.