When it comes to showing your love for a country, is it better to have unconditional love, or are you allowed to be critical?
Unconditional love can be very powerful, indeed. Wedding vows are for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health. In other words, unconditionally. A mother’s love for a child can stay strong regardless of the child’s behavior. And a pet doesn’t care about your looks, your job, or any other superficial characteristics.
However, those are all examples of the love one individual feels for another. Does that kind of love carry over to entities, like nations or brands? Should it?
On the other hand, being critical is, in it’s own way, and act of love. If you love something, like a country, you want it to be the best it can be. In order to improve, you might have to point out potential areas of improvement, and that may take the form of criticism.
But criticism doesn’t always come from a place of love. It can also come from resentment, or jealousy, or any number of other motivations. Is there an easy way to determine one way of being critical from another?
Some pundits and politicians denounce any criticism as being disrespectful. Is that valid, and/or is it helpful? Admittedly, it can be difficult to tell a loving critique from an attack, particularly when you are emotionally invested. If I love my country, and you offer a complaint against that country, doesn’t that complaint carry over to me, at least a little bit?
Can you be critical of a country that you love?
Related questions: What does it mean to be patriotic? What is patriotic behavior? When should you criticize someone? What do you love about your country?
Of course, you can be critical of a country you love. Why wouldn’t citizens want America to live up to its ideals? But I’d go beyond being critical. If you want to make change happen, you need to be active in making it so.
As deceased U.S. Representative and civil rights leader John Lewis advised Americans, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
And as the black poet, social activist, novelist, and playwright Langston Hughes wrote in his scathing poem “Let America Be America Again:”
“O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!”
Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate, and Holocaust survivor, proclaimed: “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.”
And Abigail Adams wrote many letters to members of the Continental Congress not to forget women when they spoke and wrote about independence. In fact, she wrote her husband and future president, John Adams: “I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”
Do your part to make America the America it was and is supposed to be!