Back when I was in the Army National Guard, which seems like a lifetime ago, someone asked me how I could be in the military and still call yourself a democrat. At that time, I couldn’t tell him what Adlai Stevenson so eloquently expressed. I actually told him then that I joined not out of a sense of patriotism or call for service but as a way of making money part time while going to college.
But, as the years rolled by and I left college, pursuing my writing career, which took various turns along the way, I got promoted, demoted and promoted again, and this journey lasted twenty-three years.
The weekend following 9/11 we were fundraising for the victims, one of my compadres expressed that country western musicians were more patriotic than rock musicians. I wasn’t in the mood to argue his point or opinion. I just thought that maybe he was dropped on his head too many times when he was a kid.
I didn’t think of myself as a flag waving, jingoist who looked at others with disdain and thought only of my country alone. I always looked at other nations and their people as a place to go and visit someday, take in their beauty, culture and sights that makes them proud of their land.
I also read a lot of history and learned about others’ societies and had more cosmopolitan belief than many of my brothers in arms or even fellow countrymen I worked with or came in contact with.
There is confusion between what one considers patriotism and nationalism. They are not the same. Nationalism is where one’s belief is rooted in their country no matter what. It’s a take or leave it attitude. Something I don’t agree with. Patriotism is an idea where we cherish our country, right or wrong because we who have served know the great sacrifice involved.
Patriotism is not a political ideal or a philosophy of conservative regularity in their cause. When someone else asked me why I joined the Army National Guard years later, I told him I felt it was a way of proving my duty to serve even though I’m a democrat. Patriotism is a credo to serve.
Recently, within the last twenty years my attitudes have changed to one that sees love of country as, like Stevenson stated, “steady dedication of a lifetime.” It isn’t flag waving in the back of lifted four-wheel-drive trucks that displays not just their belief in country but belief in a single man.
I don’t know if their patriotism is rooted into something of a knee-jerk response or a culmination of years of living here and seeing its greatness through many lenses. While I watched those true patriots stand at attention on Normandy beach eighty years following that fateful landing, their weathered and worn faces show us what patriotism is truly about.
Jerry Schellhammer 