Every year since I’ve been blogging, I’ve tried to do a post on Veteran’s Day. It started here, in a post I did at Armed Liberal in 2002:

I STARTED TO WRITE ABOUT VETERAN’S DAY…

…and to thank the veterans alive and dead for protecting me and mine.

…and worried that what I wrote kept coming out sounding either too qualified or would be interpreted as being too nationalistic.

And I realized something about my own thinking, a basic principle I’ll set out as a guiding point for the Democrats and the Left in general as they try and figure out the next act in this drama we are in.

First, you have to love America.

This isn’t a perfect country. I think it’s the best country; I’ve debated this with commenters before, and I’ll point out that while people worldwide tend to vote with their feet, there may be other (economic) attractions that pull them. But there are virtues here which far outweigh any sins. And I’ll start with the virtue of hope.

The hope of the immigrants, abandoning their farms and security for a new place here.

The hope of the settlers, walking across Death Valley, burying their dead as they went.

The hope of the ‘folks’ who moved to California after the war.

The hope of the two Latino kids doing their Computer Science homework at Starbucks…

I love this country, my country, my people. And those who attack her…from guerilla cells, boardrooms, or their comfy chairs in expensive restaurants…better watch out.

I don’t get a clear sense that my fellow liberals feel the same way. And if so, why should ‘the folks’ follow them? Why are we worthy of the support of a nation that we don’t support?

So let me suggest an axiom for the New Model Democrats:

America is a great goddamn country, and we’re both going to defend it from those who attack it and fight to make it better.

And for everyone who is going to comment and remind me that ‘all liberals already do that’? no they don’t. Not when the chancellor has to intervene at U.C. Berkeley to get ‘permission’ for American flags to be flown and red-white-and-blue ribbons to be worn. Not when the strongest voices in liberalism give lip service to responding to an attack on our citizens on our soil.

Loving this country isn’t the same thing as jingoism; it isn’t the same thing as imperialism; it isn’t the same thing as blind support of the worst traits of our government or our people.

It starts with recognizing the best traits, and there are a hell of a lot of them.

They were worth defending in my father’s time, and they are worth defending today.

So thanks, veterans. Thanks soldiers and sailors and marines and airmen. Thanks for doing your jobs and I hope you all come home hale and whole, every one of you.

I want to talk a bit today about debt. Non-monetary debt.Patriotism is, in its best sense, a matter of honoring debts. I’ll go back to Schaar’s “The Case For Patriotism”:

To be a patriot is to have a patrimony; or, perhaps more accurately, the patriot is one who is grateful for a legacy and recognizes that the legacy makes him a debtor. There is a whole way of being in the world, captured best by the word reverence, which defines life by its debts; one is what one owes, what one acknowledges as a rightful debt or obligation. The patriot moves within that mentality. The gift of land, people, language, gods, memories, and customs, which is the patrimony of the patriot, defines what he or she is. Patrimony is mixed with person; the two are barely separable. The very tone and rhythm of a life, the shapes of perception, the texture of its homes and fears come from membership in a territorially rooted group. The conscious patriot is one who feels deeply indebted for these gifts, grateful to the people and places through which they come, and determined to defend the legacy against enemies and pass it unspoiled to those who will come after.

It seems silly that we have to make the point that none of us could see very far except that we all stand on the shoulders of others. This is true in ideas, in culture, in the economy, everywhere we look.

What we enjoy today was earned in no small part by others who came before us. The debt we are born into we repay by leaving something better for those who will come after us.

People fought and bled so that women and minorities could vote. They fought and bled so that working men and women would have some power to balance that of their employers.

And people have fought and bled to defend this country and our allies.

In my post about torture, I pointed out that through a happy accident, this country was one where the legitimacy of the government was not based on physical fear.

In no small part, this is because of those who served wearing our nation’s uniform.

They helped pay their debt by serving; we can (and must) pay our debt to them in many ways; it starts by understanding that we are all part of this debt ‘economy’ – that we benefit from what has been and can be expected to contribute to what will be.

It starts with a recognition that we are a part of something. It’s interesting that this gets rejected both on the right and on the left; by conservatives who believe in Howard Roark, and by liberals who believe that the only community that matters is the community of man. They can’t acknowledge the value of the community which they share, and which we all share – that community which is a part of the larger community of man and which includes all of us individuals but which exists apart from both. Because of that, they are both uncomfortable acknowledging it. But then again, debtors are usually uncomfortable acknowledging those whom they are indebted to.

The people who believe both of those things are in turn protected by young men and women wearing uniforms and carrying weapons, who are willing to put themselves between – this thing which can’t be acknowledged – and those who would if they could rule us by fear and blood.

That thing which can’t be acknowledged is our polity, our political community, America. And our young men and women have protected it, protect it, and will go on protecting it.

And that is the most fundamental debt of all.

I don’t claim that we should all agree about much; I see vocal disagreement as a feature, not a bug, in our society. But we ought to agree that we owe.

And we all should be thinking hard about what we’re doing to pay that debt back.