Serve The Servants

No matter who's President next year, one thing is clear. They both believe we should support something higher than ourselves--themselves. And their fans can't get enough. They want a new ethos of self-sacrifice in the directions they support. As two progressive supporters of Obama wrote: "True patriots believe that freedom from responsibility is selfishness; freedom from sacrifice is cowardice; freedom from tolerance is prejudice; freedom from stewardship is exploitation; and freedom from compassion is cruelty."

I see others have picked up on this message, but no one has noted it more eloquently than Matt Welch at Reason:

Lord, how I despise every inch of this conversation. There is something juvenile yet creepy [...] with the spectacle of people who wake up in the morning dreaming up new ways to draw the precise boundaries around what it means to be sufficiently patriotic. [...] And there's something both authoritarian and myopic with the bizarre notion, mouthed constantly by politicians, that the most authentic manifestations of patriotism are military service, government employment, and "community organizing"... as opposed to say, hitchhiking around the Americas, or getting (maybe even creating!) a damned job doing something you love. As for pining for presidential candidates to wow the nation with calls to sacrifice that you yourself will never make...I'm sure there's a word for that, but it sure the fuck ain't "patriotic."