Real Men Care for Country

Country is a common word that is often used in reference to a nation.  More technically, a nation refers to the people of a place, while country refers to the place itself.  It is exceedingly difficult for a people who have become dislodged from a place to retain their national identity.  The Jewish people are a striking exception to this rule.  Their undying longing for a homeland has ever been the bond that has sustained them in their long odyssey as a people without a place.  All the while they have suffered unceasingly from the indignity of a people out of place wherever chance has taken them.  They continue as a people of many places.  Meanwhile, a significant number of them have established a new homeland in their historic lands, which they defend with a tenacity that has become legendary.

Nations are an evolutionary achievement.  Before there were nations there were tribes.  Tribal societies are natural to our species, the consequence of our need for security.  Tribes will ever make war on other tribes because war is the reason for their existence.  When peace breaks out and the arts of war are too long neglected, the tribe becomes vulnerable to attack from more warlike tribes and is wiped out of existence.

The transition from tribe to nation is not an easy one.  Tribes are ruled by men.  Nations come into existence when tribes aggregate sufficiently to ward off attack from other tribes.  Such co-existence of tribes require agreed upon rules, which later become laws.  

Nations are dependent upon the willingness of its citizens to submit to its laws.  When lawlessness breaks out nations are imperiled and tribalism once again emerges.  Evidence of tribalism is clear when anyone in one’s own party can do no wrong, and when anyone in the opposing party can do no right.  When we choose to use our systems of justice as weapons against our political foes we are flirting with disaster; the spilling of blood cannot be far behind.

Real men are civilized, meaning they willingly submit to law and thereby earn the right to relative freedom of action within the law.  The more law they embrace, the more free they become.  Fidelity to nation and country, the love of law, and the freedom to be had therein are the possessions of real men, their treasure to be valued and conserved and passed on to their progeny, whom they love.