Pilgrim Feet and Patriot Dreams

Photo: Darren Hauck / Getty Images.

The word "patriot" comes from the Greek patrios, meaning "of one's fathers." Etymologically speaking, or at least according to my folk etymology, a patriot is someone who honors and carries on a national legacy for the benefit of the next generation as if it were a genetic trait.

People argue about what this means. Here in Mississippi, some folks refer to Martin Luther King Day as Heritage Day--celebrating both Martin Luther King Jr. and Confederate veterans. Like most white Mississippians, I have ancestors who fought pretty much on one side of the Civil War. They wore gray and took up arms against the Union. That's my genetic heritage.

But my patriotic heritage is what tells me they fought on the wrong side. My patriotic heritage has more to do with Martin Luther King Jr. than it does with Confederate veterans. Patriotic heritage is the idea that you can have a heritage "of your fathers" that is defined by your highest national ideals, and not by your genes.

So it is no surprise that the colonists lived by an ideal of patriotism--because in declaring an insurrection against the Crown, they were rejecting their family heritage. All of them were presumably descended from more-or-less loyal subjects of the British Empire. Many of them came from, and were defined by, aristocratic backgrounds. Many of them had, metaphorically speaking, royal blood. And all of them were in a sense turning against that, on this unfamiliar continent, in favor of a new kind of heritage--a heritage that honored a national ideal "of their fathers" even if that ideal would have made their real ancestors roll over in their graves.

Since the time of the American Revolution, we have abandoned many institutions "of our fathers" and in the process adopted a patriotism that is not identical to theirs. Their patriotism was rooted in isolationism, in the idea of not having a standing army and not being involved in global disagreements. It was inconceivable to them, I'm sure, that their little utopia would turn into the dominant global superpower. Their patriotism was rooted in a form of white supremacist ideology, a sense that they were entitled to massacre American Indians for North America and enslave Africans to provide the labor to cultivate it. Their patriotism was rooted in chauvinism, the idea that women cannot and may not lead, that women cannot and may not make decisions with the same level of competence and authority as men. Today, racism and chauvinism clash with our national ideals, at least in the way we describe those ideals to others. We have, in at least some modest ways, evolved as a nation over the centuries. It is unpatriotic to say that our nation has improved? If not, is it unpatriotic to say that we can do even better if we put our shoulders into it and try?

These are questions I'm leaving for you, my readers, but for me the Fourth of July does not have much to do with those 18th-century smuggling aristocrats who rebelled against the Crown. It has more to do with the soldiers who died on Normandy and Iwo Jima, the Northern free blacks who snuck into slave states to free the prisoners of a forced labor system, the tribal chiefs who fought and died to protect their people from conquest and forced displacement, and the anonymous women who worked invisibly in our country's background to keep it running.

I don't know if this definition of patriotism would have pleased the Founding Fathers, but I doubt their definition of patriotism would have pleased their own ancestors, either. Such is the paradoxical nature of patriotism in this young country united by a national ideal of revolution, and carried forward by an unchanging commitment to change.

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