Sometimes I’m struck by the silliness of American patriotism. It celebrates autonomy and the individual. It worships a flag. I wonder if doing both of those things is honest.
The American flag holds considerable meaning for its admirers, of which I am one. But I think it would ridiculous to say that it does not chiefly represent a land and a people bound by that land.
Recently, I watched the movie Bridge of Spies. It contained a quote that made me laugh a little: “But what makes us both Americans? Just one thing. One. Only one. The rule book. We call it the Constitution, and we agree to the rules, and that's what makes us Americans. That's all that makes us Americans.”
I don’t think this is a true statement, except to represent a misconception that laws define peoples. I could live in Russia, India, or Germany for years and live by the letter of American law—I would not be an American. In the same way, an American criminal may get away with a crime while still being an American.
Laws don’t make lives. World over, human lives are very similar: working for food and shelter to support a community. The work is dictated by the land, and the combination of work and land makes up lives. Laws happen after that.
That’s why American patriotism is adrift from true patriotism. It worships a flag, perhaps rightly. That flag stands for a people, who in turn stand for a place. The place, like all places, was defined by lives lost. Some of those deaths were for good reasons, some weren’t. By and large, their bodies are part of the land, buried there. Most of America’s people are in its ground. Somehow, in spite of this history, the word “environmentalism” has a bad name in some circles. For some, it has lost its status to the god of the individual.
Environmentalism, sadly, is a partisan issue. The land of the environmentalist demographic can be outlined on a map. The outline shows America to be a massive geographical irony. The environmentalists are urban and their nemeses are rural. Moreover, it is rural people who profess the strongest allegiance to patriotism and the flag. Which represents none other than the land and environmentalism. Americans are a complex of contradictions.
Somehow, we have got it into our heads that we can support the environment without living in it—even mocking its most loyal inhabitants in the wake of an election gone haywire. Or we think that we can shortsightedly live in a world reliant on farms and agriculture even while that world is slowly eroded by our own bad decisions. Both philosophies are undone by the same flaw: unholy separation between what we live and what we believe.
Land is supposed to be holistic. Absurdly, we stand divided on it—because of it. The virtues of environmentalism and patriotism are sisters; I hope that they can meet each other in America.
