People say “country first,” but what country? The country I love and am thankfully to have been born into is a constitutional republic in which individual liberty was never to be superseded by the totalitarian edicts of the State. That vision of America has been under assault to varying degrees for all of my life, not to mention some decades before. But the ideals were at least still alive, viable, and fought for.

Tonight, I think those ideals may well be dead, or at least fast on their way to the mausoleum of history. Aside from abolition and (maybe) the repeal of prohibition, is there a single line of the Bill of Rights with which Barack Obama agrees? Is there a single American historical achievement (other than his own election) for which he is proud? Is there any substantive decision an individual can make that he does not believe the State is better suited to make on his behalf?

To love one’s country simply for being the land mass on which one was born is empty, mindless Nationalism. To love one’s country for the ideals for which it stands is true patriotism. There’s no question that I put the United States of America, the embodiment of the US Constitution, first–after, that is, my own personal liberty. I can’t guarantee I will similarly cherish whatever country this is, regardless of its name on the map, in 2, 4, or possibly even 8 years.

Simply put, when the answer to Francis Scott Key’s famous question becomes “No,” which I fear it finally irrevocably may have tonight, and that star-spangled banner no longer does wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave, the United States of American is gone. I will always love its memory, but I will never love those who, moved by hubris and their unbridled lust for power, killed it. And I will never love any country that sees me as little more than a State-owned slave.

Blacklake on November 5, 2008 at 12:13 AM