Patriotism

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What is patriotism? The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “the feeling of loving your country more than any others and being proud of it.” But what does that really mean? Can you be proud of your country while also seeing its flaws? Do you have to love your country unconditionally in order to be patriotic? 

Of course not. We all know that nobody is perfect, we all make mistakes. We also know that a country is made up of the people inside of it, running it, living in it. Can you have a country without people? No. So how can a country that is made up of imperfect people be perfect? There is just one simple answer to that question: It can’t. 

Understanding that a country cannot be perfect because it is made up of imperfect people means that we can understand that there will be mistakes, there will be flaws. Maybe a law gets passed that later generations realize was a bad law. Or maybe a policy gets implemented that causes unnecessary harm. Countries can make mistakes because people make mistakes. Does this mean that we have to pretend these mistakes didn’t happen? No. Does this mean we have to love our country less? No. So what does it mean?

We have to be realistic. We can’t live in an idealised version of our history, pretending things were better than they were. Our history is ours. Our mistakes are ours. But our triumphs are also ours. We must understand that every part of our history is ours to do with as we please. The importance of remembering our mistakes is so that we don’t make them again. We learn, we grow, we progress. But if we don’t remember what we are learning, growing, or progressing from, how will we be sure not to stumble back into previous failures? We can’t. So our history, mistakes and all, is necessary for us to actually advance in the future. 

But how can we be patriotic if we admit to our faults? Well, that’s not hard if we understand that we, ourselves, are not perfect and therefore our country has never been perfect either. What makes our country great is the ability to learn, adapt, and rise to the challenges we face. We can love our country while admitting to the mistakes of the past, because we want our country to do better. Our desire to do better, to push ourselves and by extension our country to do better, is exactly the type of love required of patriotism. Only by accepting our country’s flaws and fixing them, can we truly be patriotic.