Should I be worried about my patriotism?
Watching the Winter Olympics in Vancouver last month, I realized something was happening that caused me pause. I found myself quietly cheering for the home team Canadians in the gold medal hockey game.
There, I said it.
My son understood my sentiment, especially since I wanted Dallas Stars’ star and Canadian Olympian Brendan Morrow to be in good spirits when he resumed playing for the home team.
He will be. The Canadian team won the gold in an overtime thriller against the upstart United States team.
We had our “Miracle on Ice” in the 1980 Lake Placid games against the Russians. We were amateurs; they were professionals in any honest sense of the word. Our kids beat their men. Freedom-loving Americans defeated the Communist Soviets. The Cold War would end before the close of the decade, but the victory at the rink in upstate New York that night might have been the icebreaker.
Now the thaw I feel in my cold competitive heart signals something else. We used to cheer for America against Iron Curtain countries. Those manly-looking, testosterone-aided East German swimmers chilled our sympathies. Those biased Romanian figure-skating judges stole medals from our deserving youths. And those Red Chinese were making it clear that if they put their minds to it, they could produce champions as surely as cheap goods.
But I found myself sympathizing with the Russians for their poor achievements at these games. (Still, the Russian skater didn’t outperform the American gold medalist just because he could do a quadruple jump. He was a poor sport.) I was happy for the Belarus aerial skier who won the gold, and for the American who risked a medal by doing his most difficult signature Hurricane aerial maneuver and landed the silver. Good for both of them. I wanted to see China show well in winter games, as they have in summer games. The competition will be better with them as a real threat.
But just to show it’s not about secret socialism in my heart, I was thrilled that little Norway (only 5 million people) dominated the alpine events in a way fitting for the country that gave us alpine sports. (Okay, so I have Norwegian heritage on my mother’s side, and Norway is a highly socialized democracy.) As for our neighbors to the north, Canada hosted the games and delivered a great showing in the sports that matter most to them. Good for them.
G. K. Chesterton, that witty British journalist of yesteryear, said of patriotism that it’s the right impulse to love most that which you are closest to. He argued that those “cosmopolitans”, who disdain nationalists for being nativists, really love mankind more than men, as some might love motherhood more than their own mothers. There’s a strange coldness, he thought, about those who cannot celebrate their own country in favor of vaguely honoring all countries.
But can you celebrate your own country and still can be happy for those who celebrate their own?
I don’t apologize for loving my own son and daughters more than yours, but that doesn’t excuse me for failing to see yours as valuable to you as mine are to me. They aren’t less than mine because they are yours. And America isn’t better because it is my country than Ghana is if it is yours.
All people of faith are taught some version of the biblical command “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.”
Somehow that suggests that true patriots learn to love neighboring countries while proudly waving their own flags. National zeal needn’t fly in the face of another’s flag being raised on the highest podium.
We may never learn the words to the Belarus national anthem, but we can know the feeling in the heart of those who sing it — and maybe we can even learn to hum along with them.
