Patriotism

There is nothing wrong with loving your country. No rational, sensible person outright hates the nation that bore them, fed them, and allowed them to live a mostly free and mostly safe life (depending on where you are at, of course.) Unfortunately, a lot of people aren't rational and sensible

     Even in my state of disillusionment and disenchantment, I don't outright hate this place. Even so, there are some dark evils in this society that are not being addressed accordingly, like human trafficking, racism, and the treatment of the poor, homeless, the drug addicted, and the mentally ill. 

 It's not the country itself I hate. It's the callousness and lack of compassion of some of the people here. Also, just because I love my country doesn't mean I'm super thrilled with it's leadership. We elect senile old men as our major leaders, they lie and spout silly rhetoric while they start wars and they wallow in taxpayer funded luxury while millions of people are living paycheck to paycheck. As the old saying goes, "in politics and war, old men lie while young men die."

  With Coronavirus, you see the crocodile tears and true colors of our leadership, a good chunk of whom are exploiting this national emergency for political gain and using it to justify the stripping of some of our basic liberties. Our leadership sucks. You definitely don't have to be a genius to be in a position of power in the United States. Just like when dumb parents have intelligent children, the children often suffer because of it, putting an idiot in a position of power often makes everyone else suffer because of it and can cripple liberty.

      As far as patriotism goes, well, patriotism is severely exploitable by people in positions of power. If you challenge the authority of a leader, one of the oldest political tricks in the book is to say "if you don't like what I'm doing, you don't love your country." Essentially turning dissenters into enemies of the state just because they dissent. 

Yes, this does happen in the United States, it just operates a little differently than other places. Patriotism is easily manipulatable, often viciously, and is used to consolidate power and further the resolve of a cause, whether that cause be a war or a political campaign, and it is used to delegitimize and sometimes dehumanize dissenters by saying they aren't as "American" as the self-described patriots. This turns dissent into sedition, and makes dissenters enemies instead of people who just simply disagree.

Have a good day everyone.