Patriotism, by Phillip Hoyle

Last weekend while travelling south along I-25, we approached the Broadway exit. A large American flag held aloft on a sturdy pole sunk in concrete and sitting at the top of a rampart flapped in the breeze. “I’ve never noticed that before,” my friend commented.

“Nor I. Must be new,” I responded.

Her next comment was about how good it is to live in America. I agreed with my rather minimal statement that I, too, was happy to live here. I believe for her the sentiment is rather standard fare formed from listening to too much conservative talk radio. We don’t talk about that. For me the issue of being “proud to be an American” is something quite different. She seems some kind of absolutist while I am surely a relativist. So are we philosophers? Since we spotted the flag on I-25 I’ve been thinking about patriotism—perhaps that does make me a philosopher of sorts.

I believe patriotism most dramatically relates to an image of heroes who put their very lives on the line for their identity as part of a particular people. The history of any Fatherland or Motherland obviously has its origins in the LAND. For me the land is always the Flint Hills of Kansas. I grew up in wide open spaces with a broad river valley and low bluffs nearby. The landscape was further defined by creeks: so grassy highlands and wooded valleys with stretches of plowed fields in the bottomlands of waterways are all a part of my fatherland. Agriculture abounded there.

In my particular patria a military presence with a long history lent gravity and opened me to a larger society and world. I grew up around the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry; Custer was once stationed at Fort Riley just across the river from our town. The presence of historic stone buildings that housed both the officers and the fine horse stock of the cavalry, of wooden barracks for the enlisted men, of parade grounds, of rifle ranges, of helicopters coming and going in the air around the base’s heliport, of convoys made up of personnel carriers and artillery, jeeps and guns, trucks and heavy machinery often impeding traffic on highways, and of our lively community that entertained GIs provided endless variety for a Kansas town me. Then there were the children of Army families in our school population, and for me, the family-owned IGA store providing groceries for families of GIs, Civil Service employees, as well as the townies like me.

Thus my patria was racially mixed, with multiple languages, mixed-race families, and people who had lived all over the world—especially Germany and Japan as I recall it. Soldiers marched in local parades and cannons and other Army equipment impressed the youngsters and brought tears to the eyes of elders.

My fatherland was rather new by world standards yet as a youngster I felt connected to the antiquity of the place by the presence of an old log cabin church and by stories of my ancestors who had long lived in the area. Still the Hoyle and Schmedemann families arrived only three generations before my advent. My great grandparents came to Kansas to homestead. Some may have come to help assure that Kansas would be a free state in the political heat up that eventuated in the US Civil War. Yet in my family there were no ultimate patriots—those who made the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ for their country—in any of the stories I heard.

Growing up I heard lots of talk of such sacrifices of life, but most of them were in sermons not about the country but quoting a “no greater love” value as applied to the ultimate vicarious death of Jesus as the Christ. Religion figured heavily in my fatherland.

I became aware of the country as something much larger than my state when I heard my parents talk about the differences between Ike Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, then when I met men who had served in the Korean conflict, when I further realized just what the US Army did besides entertain us with wild stories and exotic tattoos, when I became aware of missile crises, the Cold War, the building of the interstate road system, the anti-communist diatribe, the deaths of national leaders, the threat of the draft, the Vietnam non-war, the peace movement, and the growing realization that our USA motivations idealized in myth and PR announcements didn’t well match my own vision of reality or basic values.

Welcome to thoughtful adulthood, Hoyle.

AND EVEN MORE THAN THAT, THERE WAS ALWAYS THAT NAGGING REALIZATION THAT IF ANYONE REALLY KNEW ME, THEY CERTAINLY WOULDN’T LET ME BE A PATRIOT IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD.

But I am a patriot who feels a deep sense of meaning in being American. I love it but not in an exclusivist, better-than-any-other identity or country.

© 25 Sep 2013 

About the Author  

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, and socializing. In general he keeps busy with groups of writers and artists. Following thirty-two years in church work and fifteen in a therapeutic massage practice, he now focuses on creating beauty. He volunteers at The Center leading the SAGE program “Telling Your Story.”

He also blogs at artandmorebyphilhoyle.blogspot.com