As a soldier in the United States Army, I have often pondered what it means to be patriotic, what it means to serve our country, and what it means to love America. In “Will War Ever End?” I described a dangerous misconception of patriotism that I witnessed while deployed in Baghdad.
When I was deployed in Iraq and had a chance to watch American news channels, I heard commentators say that if we question or criticize our government, we do not love America and are being unpatriotic. They believed that patriotism meant waving a flag and being blindly obedient, but this is not what it means to love our country.
What does it mean to truly love our country? We can better understand love of country by realizing what it means to love a child. Parents who love their children will try to correct a child caught stealing, abusing people, or being dishonest. For parents who do not truly love their children, apathy will cause them not to care, enabling their children to get away with anything. In this same way, if we love our country we will do our best to improve it. We will try to make America a better place for everyone, as courageous citizens have always done.
Since our country’s founding, brave patriots have worked to give us the many freedoms we enjoy today. Although I am part African American and part Asian, I had the opportunity to graduate from West Point and I have the freedom to write these words, because patriotic Americans loved and were therefore willing to improve their country.
These liberties were not achieved overnight. Two hundred years ago in America, anyone who was not a white, male landowner suffered oppression. During this era, the majority of people lacked the right to vote, and many Americans lived as slaves.
Our country is much more humane today than it was then. This happened because courageous citizens such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony, Woody Guthrie, Smedley Butler, Henry David Thoreau and many others struggled to make our country a better place for all people.
Because of the countless responsible Americans who loved and were therefore willing to question, constructively criticize, and improve their country, America has made a lot of progress.
When my father was drafted into the Army in 1949, the military was segregated because the government upheld an official policy that viewed African Americans as inferior and subhuman. Fifty years before then, the government would not allow women to vote, and only 50 years prior to that, the government supported and protected slavery.
To overcome the injustice that still persists, patriotism is a labor of love that requires us to question our government and think ritically so that America can become a more humane and peaceful country for all of its citizens and a role model for the rest of the world. Although we have a long way to go before America truly becomes a symbol of justice and peace for the rest of the world, we have also journeyed a long way in this democratic experiment because of patriotic Americans who loved and constructively criticized their country. Martin Luther King Jr. said:
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