There are no short cuts
Jim Wright had a lot of people asking him, as a veteran, what he thinks of Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to stand for the national anthem at a football game. So he told them. As a veteran.
Respect has to be earned.
Respect cannot be demanded at the muzzle of a gun or by beating it into somebody or by shaming them into it. Can not. You might get what you think is respect, but it’s not. It’s only the appearance of respect. It’s fear, it’s groveling, it’s not respect. Far, far too many people both in and out of the military, people who should emphatically know better, do not understand this simple fact: there is an enormous difference between fear and respect.
Respect has to be earned.
Respect. Has. To. Be. Earned.
Respect has to be earned every day, by every word, by every action.
It takes a lifetime of words and deeds to earn respect.
It takes only one careless word, one thoughtless action, to lose it.
You have to be worthy of respect. You have to live up to, or at least do your best to live up to, those high ideals — the ones America supposedly embodies, that shining city on the hill, that exceptional nation we talk about, yes, that one. To earn respect you have to be fair. You have to have courage. You must embrace reason. You have to know when to hold the line and when to compromise. You have to take responsibility and hold yourself accountable. You have to keep your word. You have to give respect, true respect, to get it back.
There are no short cuts. None.
Now, any veteran worth the label should know that. If they don’t, then likely they weren’t much of a soldier to begin with and you can tell them I said so.
IF Kaepernick doesn’t feel his country respects him enough for him to respect it in return, well, then you can’t MAKE him respect it.
You can perhaps make him put on a show of it, but that’s not the same thing.
t’s only the illusion of respect.
You might force this man into the illusion of respect. You might. Would you be satisfied then? Would that make you happy? Would that make you respect your nation, the one which forced a man into the illusion of respect, a nation of little clockwork patriots all pretending satisfaction and respect? Is that what you want? If THAT’s what matters to you, the illusion of respect, then you’re not talking about freedom or liberty. You’re not talking about the United States of America. Instead you’re talking about every dictatorship from the Nazis to North Korea where people are lined up and MADE to salute with the muzzle of a gun pressed to the back of their necks.
And why would we respect that?
And that is the rant of a true patriot, one who cares about what America *ought* to be.
I admire Mr Wright for those words. I’ve been accused a number of times of not loving my country. Which, in a country that is regarded as lacking in patriotism is perhaps something. I’ve always been deeply suspicious of overt and over-the-top displays of patriotism and national pride. I detest jingoism and the whole ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude.
It’s not at all that I don’t love my country. Quite the opposite. I love the land deeply. I even love the ideal of my country. All the best and aspirational things about it. I’m also realist enough to recognise that as a society we often fail to meet those ideals. Being better than a tyrant or another nation that behaves badly is to damn with faint praise. Part of loving your country is knowing when it does not deserve respect.
I don’t want flags, or anthems, oaths or salutes. These are the tools of mindless tribalism that enable good people to take that small and invisible step from pride in self to the othering of innocents.
I got into an argument with some co-workers two years ago. They were floating the idea of having O Canada played every morning and we’d all, as an office, stand at our desks and sing along. It was supposed to be a morale builder. I explained why the idea didn’t work for me and I mentioned up front that my patriotism would be questioned within seconds (this was an in-house online discussion forum).
O Canada is problematic to say the least. The sexism bothers me a lot and the French lyrics that everyone interpolates in order to be “inclusive” are a ridiculous bit of Christian chest-thumping. I can’t see most of my the people in my office, who are largely Muslim and Sikh, appreciating that little bit of forced Christianization.
As an atheist, I can’t sing those words. And no I won’t go along with it for the sake of tradition or anything else. The anthem is actively hostile to non-Christians and sexist to boot. But even if the words were perfectly representative of all Canadians, starting each day by singing the national anthem… what? Mandatory displays of patriotism…? What? Did I wake up in North Korea? The cluelessness, the complete lack of introspection made my eyes water.
Two posts later I was informed that if I was a True Canadian[TM] I would respect tradition and sing the damned anthem as it was written.
Sorry, I should be clear that the sexism of “All our sons’ command” is every bit as much a deal-breaker as “God keep our land”.
“For your arm knows how to wield the sword
Your arm knows how to carry the cross;
Your history is an epic
of brilliant deeds
And your valour steeped in faith”
Wow, I’d never actually looked at O Canada before. Can anyone spell Crusaders?
You may or may not be interested to know that NZ has three official national anthems with equal standing. There’s the original God Save the Queen and the English and Maori versions of God Defend New Zealand. The two versions of God Defend New Zealand are actually quite different although thematically similar.
All three of them are dreary and God soaked. On the bright side the major themes of GDNZ are about peace, honesty, and amity. We just need a secular version with a slightly subversive twist and a catchy melody that doesn’t make us sound like we’re at a funeral.
Also, my favourite suggested new flag in our recent referendum was https://twitter.com/ebryantnz/status/597617820285927424. Sadly, most of my fellow citizens disagreed. I mean, who could go to war for (or against) stick man on a bike?
Rob,
Kiwis really should change their flag, they could be mistaken for Australians, like your PM, which of course is deeply insulting to New Zealanders. I liked the silver fern version. Have you seen John Oliver’s comments on the flag referendum?
I don’t even know if the National Anthem is played at football matches here in Oz, I don’t really care. I’d prefer the Marsellaise any day, without the words of course.
RJW,
Want our PM? You can have him. One way deal though. I thought John Olivers comments were spot on. I voted not to change the flag, not because I like the current one – which incidentally we had before Australia chose theirs), but because I thought our flag was being changed for all the wrong reasons and the options and process used sucked like a drain. If they’d have put stick man on bike into the ballot I would seriously have voted for that though.
Time for a new flag is when we become a republic, which is when we should revamp our anthem as well.
I gotta say, as far as music goes the French and Germans know how to stir the blood, even if the lyrics are a bit dud.
@ctygesen: At WORK? Srsly? I thought people were glad to be through with rituals-made-meaningless-by-compulsory-daily-repitition when they graduated from high school. I sure was. I actually *like* singing O Canada (with appropriate private emendations) once in a while, on special occasions. And that’s the key: occasionally. Compulsory regular performances of patriotism are bullshit.
I believe the “all thy sons” (in “O Canada”) is now officially “all of us”. And the English version is noticeably less reilgious than the French one. Unfortunately, for ethnic-political reasons, efforts to change the French wording have generated opposition from the very people whom one would normally expect to want God out of their anthem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Canada
I would just LOVE to have a flag no one could go to war against! And if we had that, one that no one could go to war FOR would be awesome too. Mmmm.
Alas, our Stars and Stripes waves over a whole lot of warfare. Echoing others’ sentiments here, my own affection for and attachment to the U.S. is from sheer familiarity (anyone’s home has a place in their heart if they don’t waste it) and the ideal of a country where you can do your own thing, short of messing around with others’ doing theirs, and be part of a community that strikes a balance between mutual support and elbow room. Demanding public patriotism hasn’t got a thing to do with mutual support and stomps all over elbow room.
I’ll grant the U.S. as it is isn’t a total failure at that ideal, and that as an ideal, it may have a bit more following in the U.S. than in many other countries. But if all you’ve got to offer your loved one when you’re being objective is that sort of faint praise, there’s plenty of work to be done and it’s not time for victory parades.
The knee jerk rituals of pledging and standing have come unmoored from any significant meaning.
This sort of robs Kaepernick’s gesture of the specificity it should have. How can anyone tell what he means? If I were to attend a game and sit in solidarity with him, there’d be yet another layer of meaning heaped onto the already pointless ritual of anthem-standing.
Jeff Engel @10
Theoretically, there is the White Flag that fills such conditions.
Respect for the USA? Ask the syrian kurds just abandoned to their fate by Obama in behalf of his BFF Erdogan who just invaded Syria to attack those same kurds. Ask the houthis in Yemen being bombed every day by KSA aircraft using USA-made bombs. Ask the libyans. Ask the iraqis. Ask the afghans, thrown under the bus by USA abandonment, being attacked everyday by drones piloted by americans sitting comfortably at Ramstein and other safe places. Ask the pakistanis, another captive population for USA-drone gamers. Ask the people of Donetsk and Luhansk shelled and attacked daily by ukrainians trained, armed and guided by USA military personnel; what about USA support for the ukrainian fascists especially the Azov brigade; ask any of the populations under despots put in place by phony USA-sponsored “colour revelations”. Ask those people of central and South America whose relatives were murdered by dictators whose regimes were supported and trained by the USA – school of the Americas anyone? The CIA-sponsored coup against Allende that brought Pinochet to power? Respect? It is to laugh.
I think Rob@2 wins the thread so far. There’s a vast difference between loving one’s country and patriotism. I am the least patriotic person I know but I love a lot of things about my country.
It’s a silly little island but (like any other) as full of amazing, weird, brilliant people as it is of cruel, stupid ones. It has scenery that’s the envy of the world (the coastline of Nothumbria and eastern Scotland, the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District….) but we also have Swindon. As a nation and as individuals, we’re capable of immense kindness and charitable thought and deed and yet Suddenly Brexit.
We thrive in an almost fetishistic fervor on democracy and yet we have kings and queens and – apparently in the majority – want this to continue.
Loving some of those things about my country does not in any way invoke patriotic feelings in me. But there are plenty of people (especially post-Bexit, I guess) who would say that itself means I don’t love my country at all.
latsot @14
“There’s a vast difference between loving one’s country and patriotism. I am the least patriotic person I know but I love a lot of things about my country.”
Actually you’ve just declared your patriotism by writing those comments, so there’s not really a ‘vast difference’ between the two. I think people confuse ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’.
“We thrive in an almost fetishistic fervor on democracy and yet we have kings and queens and – apparently in the majority – want this to continue.”
Well, as the inventors of modern democracy, your fellow islanders are entitled to their eccentricities, some of the world’s most civilised nations are monarchies. You’ve slipped behind somewhat—first post the post voting and an unelected upper house? Really?
As a citizen of one of Britain’s former colonies, I’m very grateful for those institutions we inherited from the UK, otherwise my country’s history would probably have resembled Argentina or Chile.
“It has scenery that’s the envy of the world’. Do I detect a patriotic sentiment?
Perhaps not ‘the envy of the world’, but beautiful all the same. The South Island of New Zealand and SE Australia are also beautiful (Australia isn’t all desert btw).
“Loving some of those things about my country does not in any way invoke patriotic feelings in me”
I can’t tell you how you feel, however I definitely feel patriotic when I see the deep green forested hills where I live in Victoria state in SE Australia. Of course there are dangerous animals there as well, but no place is perfect.
@RJW:
Some people might, I don’t. I can love various aspects of my country without supporting it, as a country. I love some aspects of the place I happen to live, I don’t support many of the things its government and people are currently doing. But I’m not going to quibble about whether that’s patriotism or nationalism, nothing could be less interesting.
Then perhaps you haven’t seen it. There is scenery here as nice and as dramatic as any I’ve seen anywhere around the world. Lots of people come to look at it.
I don’t recall saying Australia was all desert. btw.
RJW:
I think that if you read the history of it, ‘modern democracy’ is not any one nation’s creation. Cromwell’s English Revolution of 1642-1651 petered out with the Restoration, during which beheading of regicides became something of a national pastime, akin to taking muffins and tea at the village rectory.
Iceland has a democracy going back to the 11th C., and Switzerland something similar.
What we in the Anglosphere know as democratically elected representative government is a joint British-American product. The English Revolution came to fruition when the American colonies revolted, and the British forces were finally defeated in the War of 1812. The US Constitution of 1776 was the model for the Australian one of 1901, but with significant difference: like no election, at any level, of the judiciary..
Omar, @17
Your definition of ‘democracy’ is far too imprecise. I’m sure if Rob reads this he will remind us that NZ has a strong claim to being the world’s first democracy.
(1) “Iceland has a democracy going back to the 11th C., and Switzerland something similar.”
Switzerland has only become a democracy very recently, the country only gave women the vote in the 20th century after a referendum in 1971 and I’d bet that many people including women were excluded from Iceland’s ‘democracy’.
(2 “The English Revolution came to fruition when the American colonies revolted, and the British forces were finally defeated in the War of 1812.”
“came to fruition’, very bitter fruit indeed for a large proportion of the American population. The culmination of the War Of Independence was an American oligarchic slave-owning republic, not a democracy. Women of course, were excluded from the franchise and presumably there were property qualifications for the right to vote.
(3)”The US Constitution of 1776 was the model for the Australian one of 1901, but with significant difference: like no election, at any level, of the judiciary..”
Yes, that’s correct, although the most significant difference is that the Australian system combines US style federalism with the Westminster system.
So, to be more precise I’ll state that the British were the originators of the process that led to our modern, rather flawed, democracies.
Rob will only get involved to the extent of reminding everyone that there is no such thing as ‘democracy’. There are countries and regions that practice what we could describe as democratic traditions. Within those regions and over time the practice of democracy has been quite varied and the forms of government have varied from loose overlays on top of clan and family systems, to the modern parliamentary or republican systems we see around the world. Many democracies have restricted voting for slaves, women, those without land, those below certain ages and those with criminal convictions or mental illness.
You head down a slippery slope trying to define ‘the first’ democracy.
RJW #18: & Rob #18:
No form of government has ever rolled off history’s production line in shiny new ‘completed’ form. Every political system is a work in progress.
The most important transition everywhere has been the ever-increasing franchise: the spasmodic breakup of the power of entrenched oligarchies: the landed ones particularly.
Which is not to deny that new ones are in a constant process of attempted formation. Vide the Obeid-Sinodinos-Girolanamo gang and Sydney Water Holdings – arguably an attempt to neofeudalise a significant part of Sydney’s water supply.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/01/operation-spicer-proves-we-need-icac-any-half-decent-government-would-restore-its-funding
The outward manifestations of patriotism seem to me like the outward manifestations of religion. If “every knee bows,” or every hand is over every heart, that *does* seem to satisfy the loudest growlers. They want physical compliance or obedience. What goes on internally is of less concern.