A different kind of love

Call it the Era of Good Feelings.

Americans have somehow made “love” into a selfish commodity. It’s all about what you give me, how I feel, and making myself happy.

No wonder divorce rates in America have skyrocketed! True love — willing the good of the other, as Thomas Aquinas described it — is about so much more than how your partner makes you feel. It’s about how you serve each other, how you complete each other. It’s about committing yourself to each other in pursuit of the duties and responsibilities that make life worth living. It isn't easy. But love without self-sacrifice isn’t true love at all.

Unfortunately, we have taken our self-seeking views about love into politics, too. I have often noted that Americans used to appear far more patriotic when the government did far less for them. Many of the earliest patriots lived in absolute poverty — and yet they still loved their country. Abraham Lincoln received few financial favors from anyone (let alone the government!), describing his childhood as the “short and simple annals of the poor” — and yet he still embraced the American Constitution, Creed, and Dream with great pride.

But we have become too entitled for unconditional patriotism. If the country doesn’t do enough for us, if we’re the victims of “inequity,” if the government doesn’t meet all our needs and serve us prosperity on a silver platter, we’re quick to turn on our country and denounce her as wicked.

In 2016, Harvard Gazette, in a piece titled "The costs of inequality," argued that, in America, “if you’re poor, if you’re uneducated, if you’re Black, if you’re Hispanic, if you’re a woman, there often is no fair start.” One disgruntled commenter complained, “if you’re poor [America is] hell on Earth.” Even the World Economic Forum blasted the American Dream, claiming “the idea that every American has an equal opportunity to move up in life is false.”

Utterly foreign to this modern way of thinking are the words of James Garfield (who also grew up in poverty) at Arlington National Cemetery. On May 30, 1868, the nation’s first Decoration Day (Memorial Day), the then-congressman and future president addressed a crowd gathered to honor those who laid down their lives on a Civil War battlefield.

“I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering words on this occasion,” he began. “If silence is ever golden, it must be here, beside the graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech, and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung.”

But then, he made (what must appear to modern readers) a very strange comment: “For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue.”

Did Garfield mean to say that the American heroes of whom he spoke loved their country even though it asked them to die for it? Even though, candidly, it required more of them than it could give in return? Yes.

Modern readers will want to know, “Why? Why did these men love their country even though they weren’t rich, even though many grew up in poverty? Why did they love their country even though they never received a welfare check? Why did they love their country even though it cost them their lives?” But these questions betray a lack of understanding about true love.

President John F. Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Our love for our country should transcend simply receiving handouts from a benevolent government. If we truly love America — that is, if we will the nation’s good — we will cheerfully embrace our duties and responsibilities to serve her, regardless of what it may cost us.

Certainly, the men buried at Arlington Cemetery embodied that spirit. And if they could rise above humanity’s shallow, self-centered imitation of love to pursue a cause greater than themselves, may we do the same.