We are about to close out the 250th year since Tom and the boys stepped brashly onto the world stage and declared with clarity of purpose and universality of meaning our national independence. As proud Americans, we will rightly participate in moments of colorful ostentation and exuberant excess. The 4th of July is flags and fireworks, barbecue and beer, the Air Force’s fabulous Thunderbirds and the United States Marine Corps Band. While certainly some will use the opportunity to cynically enumerate our shortcomings, historical and contemporary, we are, in fact, the longest-standing nation built solely on democratic principles.
Amidst the jubilation, it is probably useful to contemplate the true meaning of American patriotism. Any country can have patriots, but American patriotism is unique. We are not a nation of race or ethnicity, of religion or sectarianism; we do not accept fealty to the absurd notion of inherited “majesty”. We come from all corners of the earth. Nothing makes us inherently better than any other humans. What binds is a set of ideals, the concept of human liberty, and that alone. We do not own this idea; it is human liberty, after all, not American liberty. We are not a people with a set of ideals; we are a set of ideals with a people. We do boldly claim stewardship of these ideals, and, in so doing, we as a nation and as individual citizens accept responsibility for living and acting on them. The conspirators of the Declaration and the framers of the Constitution understood this, and they laid a foundation for a society built on respect for human dignity.
The Constitution itself is a holistic document, imperfect in form, but perfect in meaning. It symbolizes what humans across geography and time yearn for -- a society consciously protecting and celebrating individual freedom while preserving the existence of a nation in which those freedoms may be enjoyed. There are other democratic republics, but there is no other nation like ours. This is the reason people all over the world want to come here. We have what the people of Iran and China want desperately. In contrast, immigration to Russia is the province of the likes of Edward Snowden and Bashar Hafiz al-Asad.
As citizens, we must be attentive to this responsibility we have all accepted, but to put it simply, we could screw this up. As Ronald Reagan famously observed, freedom is always one generation from extinction. That generation does not have to be youngsters convinced of society’s obligation to insulate them from discomfort. It can equally be oldsters who are so lost in narrow-minded rhetoric that they forget the point. American patriotism is not selfish or angry or confrontational or in-your-face or blindly convinced of righteousness. It is the opposite, characterized by humility and generosity, in keeping with our founding ideals.
Whether we were born American or sought and earned our way to citizenship, we have the same burden. Patriotism looks at our tremendous successes as a nation with the same honest eye as our failures, with humble recognition that each contributes to the weight of our obligation to our principles. Patriotism seeks harmony but requires honesty and selflessness. Patriotism calls for deliberate, conscious effort, not just on the 4th of July, but in any action that puts our nation’s credibility on display. We have something no one else has -- no one else has ever had, and the world is watching. As we begin our next quarter of a millennium, America needs patriots as much as ever. Let us seek to be worthy of the stewardship we have been fortunate enough to inherit.
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