How was your 'Independence Day'? It was very subdued here in my town; no community fireworks displays, and just a short flurry of fireworks in the neighborhood, unlike some years in the last decade or so. Many people I talk to seem dispirited about celebrating our 'independence,' given the situation on July 4, 2012.
If you were reading this blog back in its early years (which I think few of my current readers were), you would remember that I was much more ''patriotic'' back then, in spite of my own growing feeling of dismay and alarm at what I saw happening to our country and our people. As the years have passed since I first started blogging, I have become more disengaged from our political system, and less confident in the possibility of salvaging anything of what was once 'America.'
I do, however, believe that the South stands a better chance than the increasingly unrecognizable place called the USA.
Still, despite that, my former ''patriotism'' has shifted towards a loyalty to my folk, rather than to a set of ideas or a system of government, which our Founding ancestors, after all, said was appropriate only to a ''moral and religious people.'' Still, there are many of our folk today who still hold onto a blind faith in ideas and documents, like the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. If we admit that those documents were written to and for a people who are mostly extinct, we can give up the idea that we can patch together the America that was.
But maybe loyalty to one's people is the true meaning of patriotism, rather than blind loyalty a political system or an ideology or an idealized history.
Strangely, as I read through blogs on this Independence Day, I noticed that old-fashioned yankee-doodle-dandy patriotism is most in evidence on ''birther'' blogs, where many of the readers as well as the bloggers are disenchanted Democrats, not Republicans.
I can only hope that more people will come to realize that we should be trying to defend and preserve our folk, not a set of documents written to and for a long-gone people, a people long since displaced.
Can the old Founding ideas be applied to this modern Tower of Babel, this confused nation peopled by people from every corner of the globe, and speaking hundreds of different languages, worshipping many different gods? Our Founding ancestors certainly did not believe such nonsense. When will the 'average American' stop believing it?
