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Show Editorial Modern Patriotism What ever happened to patriotism? Is it dead, waning, or perhaps outdated? Or is the "Spirit of '76" still very much alive in this country? Certainly there are signs today that could lead large numbers of people to believe that the great wave of "patriotism" precipitated a generation ago by an event such as the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor would be an impossibility today. The vociferous and massive protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam is often equated with a dishonorable lack of patriotism. patriot-ism. And in many people's minds the attitude atti-tude "Hell no, we won't go," contested to Nathan Hale's "I only regret that 1 ve but one life to give for my country," is appalling, but incontrovertible evidence that America is on the way to moral and actual disintegration. disintegra-tion. If one is to define patriotism as Fourth of July oratory, Liberty Bell veneration and like "symbolatry," or as Stephen Decatur's "Our country may she always be right, but our country right or wrong," one may be led to the conclusion that patriotism is indeed dead or declining. Certainly, however, a more sensible and vital patriotism could be defined as a pride and love of fatherland coupled with an individual in-dividual desire to serve in its best interests. Included in this definition is the word "individual" "in-dividual" which is meant to imply that patriotism pat-riotism does not preclude dissent, but that dissent is indispensible to a viable' patriotism and to freedom itself. Historian Henry Commager Steele has gone so far as to say that "Those who have the most affection for the country are those who are 'most alienated from its present policies," pol-icies," meaning that such people are sincerely convinced that the policies of their government govern-ment are wrong and that it is in the best interests of their country to change them through peaceful protest. A key word here is "sincerely." From this perspective, then, patriotism is still very much alive and in much the same sense as it has always been alive. One feels, however, that as far as the university uni-versity "scene" is concerned, patriotism and, perhaps just as importantly, plurality, are occasionally debated through unthinking protest pro-test or its equivalent, intellectual me-toism. Popular university intellectualism is of-ten-times as subject to fads and irrational changes as is the capricious world of fashion design. A case in point is the rise and decline of "Hippiedom." Originally it seems some were honestly and sincerely prompted by legitimate motives to form a new and different differ-ent kind of society, partly in protest, partly in an attempt to practice their new found ideals. When those ideals were lost, when protest pro-test came to be merely in the name of protest, difference for the sake of difference, the once motivating cries wer rendred hollow and absurd. The "movement" was gutted, impotent, im-potent, and bereft of its parturient elan. If, then, protest and its offspring, patriotism, patriot-ism, are to remain meaningful aspects of American life, of intellectual maturity, then dissent must be honest, limited, responsible, and thoughtful. |
