Loyalty to One’s Country

For week twenty-two in our fifty week calligraphy challenge, we were given the name of Mark Twain. Any of his words were what we needed to utilize. I enjoy how Twain could bring home a point with humor and common sense while making us think through our laughter. This quote is from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs’ Court. I thought it correlated perfectly with where we are right now as a nation and a people who call themselves Americans. I wanted to do something patriotic and yet something graphic to make people think. I wanted the piece to look like an American flag without making it too perfect. The drip and dribbles were all intentional.

Here is the text of the quote…

My kind of loyalty was a loyalty to one’s country, not to it’s institutions or it’s office holders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, there are it’s mere clothing and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease and death.

-Mark Twain

I think we live in a pretty incredible country. One in which a lot of people have worked hard and long, given their lives and passions, to build a place where freedom reigns. Generations have benefitted from the ideas, innovations, freedoms and pitfalls of being such a rag tag, individual, capitalistic bunch. We are in now way perfect, far from it. Let’s not throw all that away because our politicians, institutions and all that those things entail have become a bogged down.

Let’s take a step back and focus on our country. The place where we live, earn, laugh and love. The land between our borders that gives us each the right to be free. Sure our politics are murky, we do not all agree on most days of the week, and yet if you dare to attack us, we fight back. There is a spirit among Americans that savors the highs and lows that each election brings, even if our person did or did not win. Give it time, the players and our institutions will change for the better, and sometimes for the worse.

Let us look to Twain’s words to remind us that our politicians and institutions are mere clothing. They work for a while, are in style until they are out of style, they are not what define us. Eventually they will wear out…so we have to get new clothes. Take a moment and think about being loyal to this country not all the elements of it that will eventually change. Give thanks to be an American…no matter what outfit we have on today.