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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I never quite understood patriotism. You don´t choose where you are born and being born in a certain part of the world is not an achievement in any way. Nations are only a human concept to begin with and being proud of formally being citizen of a certain nation is weird af if you ask me.
As a kid I had it hammered into my head by my grandparents that patriotism is the desire to improve (and maintain) the place where one lives.
I wish more people had that perspective. "Patriotism" as a description of blind devotion and themed outfits is pretty dumb.
Now that is something I can relate to!
Along those same lines, I feel like there is an interpretation of being proud to be American that (used to?) align with what is meant when people refer to "pride of ownership" of a house or neighborhood. The desire to maintain and improve the standard of your neighborhood as something to inspire pride, not just "herp derp I am proud of where I was born".
If your country was doing great, I could understand it. You'd be proud not of where you were born, but just how you and your fellow citizens have made your country great.
Problem is, America is very much not doing great.
I´d argue that to be simply an arbitrary choice. When being in a social multitude that is too big for you to oversee and thus to know what everyone else in the multitude is doing - it would be highly illogical to be proud of the multitude in general. Other members of your society might be doing things that you despise - without your knowledge.
By that argument, there isn't ever any pride to be had aside from personal forms, because even a multitude of 1 other isn't completely knowable.
If a kid has good grades, but there's a window of opportunity where the kid could be vandalizing things after school, your logic says their parent would be ridiculous for saying they're proud of them, because you don't fully know.
I'm not proud of America, don't get me wrong, but it's ok to be proud of one thing without omnipotence coming into play. Those that support big military have a great reason to be proud of America, and they can still be upset about the horrible education we give our kids. When pride is a buzzword it's generic but when people actually feel pride it's specific. Proud of your grades, proud of your maturity, proud of my nation's healthcare, proud of my family's cohesiveness, etc.
Being afraid to be proud, for fear of supporting or being associated with the wrong group, that's defeatist talk.
A parent is either proud of their child because of what they accomplished in raising the child- or they are proud for their child because they care about their child and are happy they have accomplishments.
I did not mean knowing every other member completely, that is obviously impossible and I assumed that was trivial. My point was that you can not be proud of people if you have no clue who they are and what they are doing and that this is inevitable in a group over a certain size. How that logic is supposed to be falsified by your example with the child evades me because usually parents know their children particularly intimately.
Agreed, you shouldn't be proud of your country, your city, your race, your sexuality, etc. I am only proud of things I've done- not what I was born into.