Lughnasa College Moon
Cool nights. I’m enjoying these. A great advantage of mountain living is that most nights are cool nights. Looking forward to that. Also, realized that after we move Coming Down the Mountain will take on a new meaning in our life.
The push this week is getting things ready to make efficient use of the SortTossPack folks. A major emphasis will be sorting art, objet d’arts, souvenirs, all that stuff that hangs around because it got set down long ago and never moved. This is the love it or leave it sort.
Which reminds me of a conversation with Tom Crane at the War Memorial during the Woolly Meeting last week. Pondering the weirdness around patriotism, the notion that the only patriots were veterans and flag wavers. I said, yes, and recalled the 60’s when the love it or leave it bumper stickers pretended to sort out the patriotic, worthy of citizenship folks from those of us with long hair and in opposition to the Vietnam War.
Love of country does not equate to love of government and pride in all its decisions. Nor does it equate to love of the economic system that sorts folks into the 1% and the 99%. Love of country has many roots and more than one flower.
With a son in the military I appreciate the dedication and sacrifice those who serve in the armed forces make, even in peace time. That some in the country want to remember and honor those who serve seems like a natural impulse to me. Most nations have needed warriors over the millennia and they are often the difference between freedom and servitude.
But, the warriors in our country serve at the discretion and for the policies of our elected officials. This means that the work they do passes through the sausage works of politics before it comes to marching orders. Not all wars (most wars?) are just. Thus, it is not reasonable to conflate opposition to war, or to a particular war, with opposition to the military per se.
The love I feel for my nation has three main sources: the people as a collective, the nobility of our experiment and the vast diversity of the land itself. Though we become separated by distance, by values, by history, by future potential each person in our nation is my fellow citizen, a person whose rights and responsibilities I respect.
This great experiment, whether a people with roots in other lands can flourish as one country, is a noble one because it represents in microcosm the world. The fact that our history has many regional, ethnic, even religious conflicts does not take away from the experiment, rather it underwrites it. Can we live with and grow together in spite of the depth of our differences? That a nation can persist, can become great under such circumstances is hopeful.
Finally, this land that is our land. The oceans and their shores. The rivers and lakes. Old mountains like the Appalachians and young vibrant mountains like the Rockies. Vast areas of level fertile soil in a humid climate. Even vaster areas of thin, rocky soil in arid climates. The forests and the wildlife, the farms and the ranches. The wild places and the domesticated. It is a wonder and a full lifetime, even two full lifetimes would not be enough to explore it.
It is this combination of people, political purpose and powerful geography that makes me love where I was born and where I will die. The good old U.S.A.
