Is "patriotism" just one more scam used by the haves against the have nots? [View All]

[Cyrano]

The core of my question is, what do we mean when we call ourselves patriots? Is a "patriot" someone who stands by his or her country, no matter what, just because it happens to be the place they were born? What if I had been born into Nazi Germany and supported all of their polices? Would that have made me a "patriot?"

Way back when, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner had a comic routine titled, "The Two Thousand Year Old Man." Brooks was the old man and Reiner was a reporter who was interviewing him. At one point, Brooks says, "Oh, yeah. We also invented national anthems."

"What was yours?" inquired Reiner.

Brooks sang, "Hurray for cave 69. Screw everybody else."

Evidently, we haven't come very far since then. Today, our national anthem could very well be, "Hurray for the USA. Screw everyone else."

Many moons ago, I was a grunt who was gung ho enough to do whatever the leaders of our country told me to do. Is that patriotism? Or is that just what every German on trial at Nuremberg claimed? "I was only following orders."

Given Vietnam and Iraq, I've been wondering whether patriotism is nothing more than a tool used by the wealthy and powerful to get the rest of us to do whatever it is they want done.

So, again I ask, is patriotism nothing more than a matter of where you happen to have been born? I really don't have the answer to that question. Do you?