So I’ve been spending a lot of time randomly trolling through alt-right and conservative news platforms, reading a lot of independent bloggers (duckduckgo.com) and the such. In the midst of all this, what I discover what it comes down to:
- Are you a patriot?
- Do you want to be faithful to God?
- Are you loyal to our country or not?
In America, the ethos comes down to patriotism, law, loyalty (I pledge allegiance to the flag), and God (the Judeo-Christian, mostly protestant Quaker-God).
Which gets me down the interesting rabbit hole:
What is a patriot?
And also:
*WHY* be a patriot?
Some of my thoughts:
1. Patriot = fellow country man, pater (father)
Who is your daddy, and what does he do?
The word patriot goes back to Ancient Greek — the notion of ‘pater‘ (father).
In Latin the notion of ‘patriota‘ (fellow country man) referred to your ‘patria‘– your home country. Cognates in Greek with ‘patriÄÌ‘ which meant ‘lineage, descent, race, stock, tribe, clan, home’.
So in some sense:
A patriot is someone who is loyal to their country, to their ‘race‘, their nation, or their kind.
Now this is tricky because the trillion dollar question:
Who or what are you loyal to?
2. So who are you loyal to, and for what?
This gets tricky. Very dynamic. So question:
How do you balance your allegiance or loyalty compared to your lineage, your race, stock, (‘original’) nationality, your local community, your state, your city, your friends and family, etc?
For example I am Korean-American. My parents are both from South Korea (my mom from Busan and my dad from Seoul). Do I first see myself as American, or Korean?
But I was born in America! I was born in UCSF (San Francisco hospital), grew up here, ate Costco Corndogs, and grew up to Animaniacs. I look Korean, I look Asian … but ultimately my culture is 80% ‘American’ and only 20% Korean (I still do like certain Korean Confucian notions of respect for elders, education, etc).
I also was raised in the Bay Area but went to school in LA (UCLA). When I first went to college I pledged allegiance to the Bay (stupid dumb and hyphy, ‘yellow bus retarded’ to quote E-40). I would say ‘hella’ (people from SoCal don’t say this word). But technically we are all from California. This is what non-Californians don’t understand:
The Bay Area (NorCal) is distinctively *VERY* different from SoCal (Southern California).
Similar how Berliners from Germany are very Anti Munich. Or how people from Marseille (Je Suis Marseille) are very anti Parisians. Or how people from New York City are very different from people from upstate NY like Rochester. Or how folks from the UAE (Dubai) are not the standard ‘middle eastern Afghan’ that the right-wing media (Fox News) portrays them to be.
3. Why be a patriot?
Why does being an American or whatever you are matter to you, or myself? Similarly speaking, why do folks from New York City (Manhattan folks ‘on the island’) always love to tell strangers that they are from New York? And why do folks who live in Queens (Astoria, etc) not considered ‘really’ from New York? Certainly it is some sort of human bias or desire to differentiate oneself, or to be seen as more elite.
And I think I figured it out:
It is impossible to assert your own individuality and sense of self *WITHOUT* comparing yourself to others.
In other words:
Being human is all about comparison.
ERIC KIM