It's Time to be World Patriots

A patriot has been defined as someone who enthusiastically supports his/her country. Let's encourage everyone to be a patriot in the broadest sense of the word. A world patriot supports not only his/her more immediate communities but also the global community. As a person grows up and matures, the community that one is familiar with and becomes attached to becomes ever larger, from the family, to the neighborhood (or, in some places, the tribe), soon the town and possibly the district or county, and later the province or constituent state -- "I'm proud to be a Texan," or a Connecticut Yankee, a Californian, etc. -- and then one's country. Since no country consists exclusively of one ethnic group (possessing the same physical and cultural characteristics, language, and religion or ideology), a variety of persons can call themselves patriots of the same country. Patriots of some larger and heterogenous federations, like the United States of America, the United States of Brazil, and Canada, may in fact be descended from assorted immigrants from different continents.

  Patriots can be beneficient. Adlai Stevenson defined American patriots as "those who love America enough to see her as a model to mankind." However, Malcolm X warned that, "you're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or who says it." To the extent that a person's intellectual growth is stunted and one's Weltanschauung ceases to expand, virulent patriotism, feeding on fear and hatred of anyone different, even government employees, becomes pathological. Some self-proclaiming "patriots" or other cultists exclude certain other groups of human beings, viewing them not just as "strangers" or "foreigners," but as hated enemies to be eradicated. Think only of Timothy McVeigh and Oklahoma City, a Ratko Mladic and Srebenica, or a Shoko Asahara of Aum Shinrikyo and Tokyo. Better avoid such excesses of patriotism and heed Guy de Maupassant's caveat that, "Patriotism is a kind of Religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched."  

 In this economically and ecologically interdependent world, with virtually instantaneous communication, it is imperative that we all learn to be members of the world community. Let's understand that we can be -- we should strive to be -- patriotic citizens not only of our home town, or our home state (e.g., California, which for a brief moment 150 years ago was an independent republic), and of the U.S.A., but also of Planet Earth. &nbsp

 It's not a matter of having to choose "either...or" -- of being either an isolationist who rejects the rest of the world's peoples, or an interventionist who ignores the needs of peoples in the communitites nearer to home. Two centuries ago in the emerging U.S.A. what a citizen needed to choose from was not limited to either remaining in a quarreling mini-state (some of which condoned slavery) within a loose confederation or becoming submerged in a unitary republic with an all-powerful central government. There was a third choice, a question of balance. What was and is required is a democratic federal structure, in which the people can participate at all levels.  

 Today remember that although Tom Paine promoted the spirit of American independence from Great Britain, he nevertheless sagely proclaimed, "My country is the world." -- By John O. Sutter