On National Pride And Patriotism

SINCE the national pride project is launched, I was wondering, what is patriotism?
Who is a patriot? He is a person who loves his country.

He is not a person who says he loves his country. He is one who cares deeply about the happiness and well-being of his country and all its people. Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by a critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their short-comings without giving way to superiority, despair or cynicism. That is my idea of a patriot.’Quite clearly patriotism is not going to be easy or comfortable in a country as badly run as X. And this is not made any easier by the fact that no matter how badly a country may be run there will always be some people whose personal, selfish interests are, in the short term at least, well served by the mismanagement and the social inequities. Naturally they will be extremely loud in their adulation of the country and its system, and will be anxious to pass themselves off as patriots and to vilify those who disagree with them as trouble-makers or even traitors. But doomed is the nation which permits such people to define patriotism for it.Their definition would be about as objective as a Rent Act devised by a committee of avaricious landlords, or the encomiums that a colony of blood-sucking ticks might be expected to shower upon the bull on whose back they batten. Spurious patriotism is one of the hallmarks of a country’s privileged classes whose generally unearned positions of sudden power and wealth must seem unreal even to themselves. True patriotism is possible only when the people who rule and those under their power have a common and genuine goal of maintaining the dispensation under which the nation lives. This will, in turn, only happen if the nation is ruled justly, if the welfare of all the people rather than the advantage of the few, becomes the corner-stone of public policy.I found this nice text above, and left out the name of the country the author is writing about. You know, who the author is? It is Chinua Achebe, writing this in an article entitled ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, in 1983, 23 years after Nigeria gained independence.Can one erase the word Nigeria and replace the country’s name with another?I am wondering.Frank TalkVia e-mailNote: name and address provided – Ed

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