"Unity"

Once again, some United States sports team is in a final of some world tournament and people who couldn't normally care less about the sport sit in front of televisions and cheer as though this is a professional team in which they own a partial interest. The number of professional soccer teams that have gone the way of the tyrannosaurus rex in the U.S. would lend credence to the assertion that the vast multitude of people tuned in to the run of the U.S. women's team in the World Cup is not due to some wild passion that Americans have for soccer. I think it is fair to say that we as a nation are fairly indifferent to the game of soccer. What I believe we are observing every time Americans who are normally indifferent to a sport get out their little flags and circle around some TV, is "false unity". You see, it is easy to turn on a game, wave a flag and make noise when a ball goes in a goal, through a hoop or over a fence, and then return to our "me-centric", "I got mine, you get yours" ways. What is far more difficult is to look at a tax increase or a cut in some funding that will lighten all of our wallets and say to ourselves, "I can weather this ... it's in the national interest." It is my position that the latter is true patriotism and the former is transparent showing of false unity.

I refuse to suddenly show interest in some sporting event that I have never watched in my life simply because one group of people wear uniforms that happen to be red, white and blue. I choose not to root for laundry. Does this mean that I am unpatriotic? I don't believe so. I spend time doing things in my community in an effort to make my little piece of America better. Quite often, I would rather stay at home (some of you who know me know that I don't really like people.) But I do what I can to help to make my part of Nation Red, White and Blue a better place. Robert F. Kennedy once said --

" -- many of the world's greatest movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant Reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and the thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal.

"Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes, "and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all. Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. Thousands of Peace Corps volunteers are making a difference in isolated villages and city slums in dozens of countries. Thousands of unknown men and women in Europe resisted the occupation of the Nazis and many died, but all added to the ultimate strength and freedom of their countries. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped."

I believe that this too, is how a great nation is shaped. I believe further that patriotism is not about standing on a big rock and boasting about how great your nation is, but about putting your shoulder to that big rock and joining together with fellow Americans to push it where it needs to go. So please do not wave your flags in my face, don't ask me to watch some sport whose rules I have never known -- instead help to find a way to take care of the weakest and most vulnerable among us -- not with arms twisted behind our backs, but with gracious smiles.