On American Patriotism in Times of War and Times of Peace
“Wars and rumors of war” is a phrase from the Greek
Testament. It is related to passages that speak of people wanted to predict the
future. On in the case of the Christian cult in post-Temple Jerusalem, the need
to predict the end of the world is something that fakes and or mimics a sense
of control.
Perhaps if you know the end date, you can make arrangements
with your personal or financial affairs. Such is the case of men, mostly young
who go off to fight in war.
The sense that you can deal with making arrangements, making
a last will and testament, or give away treasured personal items to endeared
ones, or say deep goodbyes to family and friends are part of that sense of what
many people want in terms of dealing with their very real mortality.
Dying suddenly and unpredictably is a pain in the butt so to
speak.
Trouble is that in the original passage about knowing about
the end of time, is that you do not have much advantage to a sense of control
if everybody is going to bite the dust at the same time.
People in general if
they know they only had a few hours or few days left would go of their everyday
manners and normal behaviors and just go crazy. Try and say goodbye to grandma
if she is off to Las Vegas for one last party thing before the big bang at the
end of life – all life.
Trouble is that in the sometimes confused logic of the
religionist testaments, with one breath it describes man wanting to predict the
end, and in the next breath reaffirms that even their divine messiah knows not
the time or hour of human demise.
Yet all the telly-vangelist preachers do their cafeteria
smorgasbord pick and choose religious calorie gems from the food-spiritual food
case in order to market their product, to make their spiel, sell their
particular brand of snake oil. Bottom line in business is little different in
the religionist god-business.
There has also been something like forty odd years of the
Christian religionists preaching the end of the world in the year 2000 C.E..
Sixteen years later, the religionists are still waiting for their Jesus to
return. When I say their Jesus, I have my own definition of Jesus and his
teachings that I subscribe to as a Cultural Christian.
But without doing any deep discussion about the standard
religious stuff, I wish to talk about what I see as the secular level of
beliefs, hardly a religion or dogma, but religious like glue none the less to
bind the community in a democracy.
In olden days there was a local town square in small town
America and a local town square as contained in a larger urban or city
environment. One that town square would likely be a church. That church would
have been the original church built in all likelihood a farming community. The
church was probably would have been along a road, the main road, and over time,
that church would likely be positioned at the intersection of two or more
roads, the center point of interest in the community.
The one thing that has united the United States since the War
of 1812 is the American Flag.
