When I was a child, the concept of patriotism was a simple thing. It meant standing before our flag, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and singing God Bless America. It was something we all did together, perhaps because we were so young and naïve, but I do miss that feeling of unity and standing for something, however abstract, that we shared as a country together with all creeds, colors, nationalities and an ideal of freedom, in the ritual of recognizing that we were all really just one, even if in a vastly theoretical oneness that made me feel safe somehow in a dream or model of brotherhood that we later seemed to lose along the way, perhaps in our increasing awareness of individuality and all its factions.
Now I feel some of the beautiful chill of national pride only occasionally at sports events when the crowd sings together. It’s sometimes almost as though we feel shame for recognizing ourselves as a nation with its own speckled history of grand humanitarian strides mixed with stumbling blocks of ignorance and greed (as in every other nation). When we do stand before our flag, it isn’t that we are excluding other nationalities, but rather embracing all who wish to be part of the best of our ideals and hopes.
England (with the United Kingdom), with a chronicle of over a thousand years, still does it best. When they sing their hymns and national anthems, there is something of their long history that touches every heart, not from vanity, but with a shared feeling of immense dignity and pride in standing as one people, regardless of color, accent, religion, or race. I long to feel that pride that I felt as a child about our own country, one for which there is still so much potential, if we can come together on some level ground, where personal prejudice is minimized by the overwhelming feeling of the beauty of the vast landscape and the shared prospects of its many people, with our almost limitless resources to help, rather than to hurt one another.
Here is a little video taken at Royal Albert Hall in London. It is most stunning when heard with earphones (as though you’re there). See what unity and true pride look like in the English national hymn (Jerusalem) and God Save the Queen. If it doesn’t give you chills, then your emotional freon supply has been sadly depleted. Enjoy.
Oh, and God bless America!
JB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=041nXAAn714
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
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