Do You Love Your Country?

I woke up this morning, grabbed my cup of coffee, and went to my study to sip away while reading emails; what's become my morning ritual in semi-retirement.

The first email I opened of any significance - not junk mail wanting me to buy something - was from Eric Metaxis, author of a book titled "If You Can Keep It" which I read a few years ago and enjoyed so much I subscribed to his occasional newsletter. A link to the book is at the bottom of this post.

The title of this blog, which I've borrowed from his email, seemed to me somewhat ridiculous to ask; at least for me. However, upon reading the opening sentence, I was intrigued to learn why it was posed.

So, I've decided to share it here for my few followers who may find it edifying too:

Just after the 2016 election, the Wall Street Journal asked me and several others to comment on our hopes for the Trump presidency, and here is what I wrote:

My earnest hope is that most Americans will learn again to love their country, and will understand that not to do so is like refusing to love oneself or one’s children—peevish and wrong. To love something is not merely to approve of it, but to call it upward to its best self, to call it to a purpose that goes far beyond itself. Most who have truly loved America have done so with a conviction that we are, to use Lincoln’s phrase, God’s “almost chosen people.” We have been abundantly blessed not for ourselves, but so that we could be a beacon of hope and freedom to the world, not least for people like my parents, who sailed to these shores from war-torn Europe in the 1950s and who, when they passed the Statue of Liberty, were enraptured and emotional, knowing that the liberty it represented was not just a word but could be a way of life, one they hoped to embrace and pass on to their children, and now have, by God’s grace.

Lincoln also called America “the last best hope of earth.” As he was not known to be a prideful, chest-thumping buffoon, we must wonder what he meant by that sobering expression of American exceptionalism. May we, in the next few months and years, learn again to see what he—and all of the Founders, and Tocqueville— saw so clearly: that the greatness of America lies in our goodness, and that we can never be great without being good.

My hope is that we would remember that our freedoms are extraordinarily rare and fragile. If we don’t understand what inestimable sacrifices were made so that we could have them, we will certainly lose them. My hope is that we would remember our heroes and celebrate them. For starters we could exhort our children to memorize Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” and the Gettysburg Address, because they are beautiful and ennobling and true. My hope is that we would restore to our national vocabulary the words “honor” and “sacrifice” and “dignity” and “sanctity”—and that “this nation conceived in liberty” would become a glorious and irrevocable blessing to the whole world beyond our shores forever and ever.

If you’d like to read more, I write at length about these ideas in my book, If You Can Keep It. I recommend it highly, even if I did write it!

Being that it was asked of Eric by the Wall Street Journal two years ago, I wondered if his words were ever published. Sure enough, not only WSJ, but the NYT also published it here. I suspect Eric's shared it again in today's email because of the current bitterness dominant in the Media (D) over the wall funding.

And now, for the cartoon of the day from The WSJ: