PHILSSA - Some Thoughts on Love of Country

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Some Thoughts on Love of Country

By Francia C. Clavecillas
Community Organizers’ Multiversity (COM)

I would have wanted to share insights on how to be a worthy citizen of planet earth in the context of what has already emerged as a global village. In the realities of geopolitics, however, the roots of one’s love for the planet have to be identified first before the concept of being a citizen of the world can be viewed with seriousness.

One has to have a deep sense of national identity first before being able to strongly identify with world citizenship. In other words, I shouldn’t have any self-doubt about my self-worth as a Filipino before I can fiercely protect the “right” of other nations over our biodiversity on the ground that the flora and fauna are “part of our world heritage.” The assumption is that there is a fair playing field for all nations if access to the biodiversity of whichever country in the world is the issue at hand. And before I , as a Filipino citizen, for example, can zealously protect the “right” of other nations’ legitimate access to the world’s heritage (i.e., “access” to the Philippines’ biodiversity), I should be very sure that my rights as a Filipino and those of my compatriots are equally protected.

What is true in the real world, however, is that rich nations like the USA and Japan and others maneuver their way to have life forms from our forests and other natural reserves patented without our free, prior and informed consent. We know this from the story of how Japan got a patent for our “nata de coco.” Examples are many. On the other hand, poor nations like the Philippines cannot get a patent for life forms from American, Japanese or French forests for our country’s own pharmaceutical needs. This global power relations make it almost impossible to take the concept of world citizenship seriously.

There is an emerging discourse in some intellectual corners of the real and virtual world. That is, the concept of nationalism should be reassessed now considering our present day geopolitical realities. This discourse is in contradiction to the thoughts I posed above. The argument in favor of the concept of world citizenship asserts that in a globalizing world the issues of the poor, if our biases are for the poor, are the same in all continents. There is just one planet to protect. There is just one humanity to take care. There is just one poor, deprived, and oppressed sector in the world – the poor. This argument is very attractive to incurable dreamers but in reality, the argument for love of country takes a front seat because the undoing of the irrational concept of love of country has already set up centuries-old economic, political and socio-cultural structures that fragmented the concept of humanity.

As early as the latter part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century (1879 – 1955) Albert Einstein, father of Nuclear Physics, argued against the concept of extreme love of country because it is from this mindset that expansionist nationalism emerges and thrives. It is a historical fact that the German holocaust of the 1940’s sprang from Hitler’s idea of world domination by the “superior” Germanic-Aryan Volksgemeinschaft (“people’s community”). Likewise, the force that fuels the concept of a superpower nation like the United States of America is extreme nationalism. It is a total and consuming self-determination to sustain its superpower status, obviously, at the expense of other nations’ right to survive. We know fully well too that the Cambodian holocaust at the time of Pol Pot (1975-1979 - 2,000,000 deaths) was in the name of nationalism against Vietnamese expansionist nationalism. The list of examples of extreme nationalism is long.

The other end of the pendulum of extreme nationalism is “extreme colonial mentality” where national identity is viewed as the extension of a superpower identity. The case of “The American Dream” is a glaring example, not only from the perspective of people looking for greener pastures and but also from the perspective of crafting an alternative dream for the country.

Living is a continuing definition of looking for balance as life is built on opposites—the yin and the yang; light and darkness; victory and defeat; life and death. Loving one’s country is a part of one’s birthright but thinking that one’s country is not a separate entity from other country’s self-interest (collective interest) is also supposed to be a fiber in one’s birthright. By all means, we should never entertain the thoughts of Adolf Hitler about extreme love of country that does not care about other countries. However let not this country we love so dearly lease out prime agricultural lands for agro-industrial purposes to feed the population of mainland China and leave our right to food security to the dogs.

Let not this country focus all its energies to make way for infrastructure that would support foreign investments and trade while thousands of rural poor who migrate to our cities to make a living are forcibly evicted from every space in the city in the name of absolute private property rights.

The balance between extreme love of country and extreme colonial mentality is setting reasonable priorities. The idea of letting the urban poor go back to the countryside (Balik-Probinsiya) or expecting them to embrace the concept of distant relocation areas that do not have the basic amenities of day-to-day living is not just an unreasonable solution but also something that doesn’t carry an iota of love for one’s country. We are not even talking about extreme love of country yet here because in the first place there is not even a hint of love of country if you are the head of state and you allow the threat of a major forced eviction of 390,000 families in Metro Manila alone by 2007.

There’s an old bestseller book that the multi-stakeholders of our society can use as a reference. This book is Robert Fulghum’s All I Ever Really Needed To Know I Learned In Kindergarten. Loving one’s country, he said, can be shown in a variety of ways. Among them are the following:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt someone.
Wash your hands before you eat.

Flush the toilet.

Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life.
Learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work everyday.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world, watch for traffic, hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder and wonderful things.
Remember the little seed in the plastic cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are still all like that.
Goldfish and hampsters and white mice and even the little seed in the plastic cup - they all die...So do we.
And then remember the story book about Dick and Jane and the first important word you learned, the biggest word of all: LOOK!

Everything you need to know is learned from Kindergarten years, from the Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation to Ecology and politics and sane living. Think of what a better world it would be if we all had cookies and milk at 3 o’clock every afternoon and would nap for a moment. Or if we had a basic policy in our nation, and across all other nations, to always put things back where we found them and to clean up our own mess.
And it is still the truth. No matter who you are or how old you are, when you go elsewhere in this world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.

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