John Smith
I would like to be patriotic, i really would like to feel 100% proud of my country, i want to be able to say my countrys action represnt my ideology and beliefs, however i cannot.
I would like to be patriotic but it is impossible for me to actually feel it because of how my 'homeland' has acted.
Unfortunatly true patriotism,in this day and age, does not exist.
You may not be proud of what your homeland is doing, but why does that stop you from being patriotic? I'm not proud of a lot of what my country is doing right now, but that doesn't make me less of a patriot. I fix my patriotism to the principles on which my country was founded, not to the whims of elected officials. When I feel something is going against those ideals, I do what I can to help correct it, whether by voting against an offending candidate or issue or, in one case, telling the governor of the state of Arizona to "shut the hell up" at a public gathering.
One could even argue the case of Benedict Arnold as one of patriotism in the extreme. According to his "Open Letter to the Inhabitants of North America", he saw the United States as trading the British crown for the French crown. We owed France a lot of money and our armed forces were being so badly depleted that France could have waltzed on in and mopped us up, and she had plenty of reason (mostly just to spite England). Arnold saw the chance of reconciliation with the Mother Country (after all, we were English) as a very real possibility while the French were more "foreign".* Rather than see America fall under a foreign crown, he felt America's best bet was to return to the King and try for independence later under less violent conditions.
Okay, so it didn't happen like he thought it was going to. The fact is, according to his letter, he acted in what he felt were the best interests of his country even though he was opposed to the current administration's course of action. He threw it all away to try to keep America from what he perceived as a worse situation. Sounds patriotic to me.
*I read that the state of Louisiana has a body of laws that don't quite jive with the other 49 states. While still constitutional, they are "quirky". Unfortunately, the author didn't give any examples, but did give an explanation that Louisiana's law is based off of French common law while the other 49 states' laws are based off of English common law. How different might we be if Arnold's fear had come true?