Until We Are Matriots

Our Pledge of Allegiance Must Be Extended Beyond our Borders

The indentifier "Patriot" has too often become a label of exclusion, conspicuously self-applied by a particular variety of God-and-country flag-waver, who, by the name, create a division between themselves and everyone else they deem to be outside the line they draw in the sand. Everybody inside the circle is good. Outside? Not so much.

But what original meaning does “Patriot” have? Word-oriented folk point to the root of the word--the Latin pater meaning father. So literally, patriotism is love of the fatherland--the national home of one's fathers. This is a slippery slope.

One must be careful here to limit the genealogy to a generation or two, because if Duke and Luke look back farther than that, their "fathers" came to American shores on boats and didn't talk like us. These are the excluded people who stand outside the accepted circle of today's Great American neo-Patriots.

Patriotism implies loyalty and support; it supposes that the bearer of the name will do everything in their power to sustain the well-being of the "fatherland" against all threats.

But when taken in the direction and to the extent that it often goes nowadays, this kind of patriotism only serves to divide us into camps, even while the actual landscape and and living things on it that the Patriots claim to care about are descending into darkness and decline.

Spreading more of that kind of Patriotism will not be helpful to the good lives we want for their children or ours.

There is a disconnect to claim love of country when that loved land is allowed to succumb to mass plant and animal extinctions, to climate chaos and its visible and invisible harms, and to exploitation by profiteers who see mountaintop removal and rampant deforestation as collateral damage in pursuit of near-term profit for the few, at the expense of the commons of our shared soil and air, water and forests.

And so I am suggesting a language change. And maybe if we self-label with this different name that I have in mind, we will come to think differently about all of ourselves together under this umbrella than to think of ourselves as merely Patriots. In time—and there is precious little left for it—we might think differently about the land of our attachment; about the very ground under our feet--the feet of all of us, across all oceans, north and south.

Mater is the latin word for mother. And so a Matriot is someone who loves their kin, their neighbors, their village and the natural habitat that nurtures them. A Matriot is a citizen-defender of Mother Earth. Rather than being a term of divisive exclusion, a Matriot acknowledges the common-unity (community) of all languages and races, customs and traditions from every "fatherland" the world over. We all breathe the same air and are made of the same clay.

A Matriot’s vision is for the common good, not just for me and mine, not limited to here and now. A Matriotic vision looks from today's choices to consequences a decade hence, and this determines their living ethics today—their governance and way of life, starting as children. They grow up knowing of their "personal ecology" that connects their well-being to the well-being of forest and coral reef, tropical jungle and glacier, and not just to their kin and think-alikes.

Anything that results in damage to the health and sustainability of the planet's soil and water, forest and ocean, a Matriot rejects. That which supports and sustains the same is honored and defended.

If the Patriot waving the flag does so to preserve and support the well-being of the whole of his fatherland within a seamless tapestry of fatherlands that sink or swim together, then Patriots and Matriots can live in relative harmony. Local love of one's place in the world is a beginning towards a love of the world of places. One place, understood, helps us know all places better.

Red and blue, black and white, rich and poor, Matriots and Patriots together, starting today, put this on your work hats: