My take on patriotism

"What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?"

- 林語堂 (Lin Yutang)

It was comforting to see a lot of bleeding heart patriotism this national day despite all that's been happening.

This is what I hear mostly:

1. Regardless of what happens, its MY country. I was born here, I will die here.

2. There's no place like home (often with food and culture bits added)

There's obviously more but if you dig in further into all of them, you'll notice one thing. They're all very emotional and sentimental. No rationale. Why do I say that?

Because none of the reasons you hear will assure you of your continued survival.

One could argue how different is that from living with one's parents. If you're self-sufficient, then you could argue that their survival in no way enhances yours. In fact it may even hinder it because the elderly can consume more resources like medical and leave you with less to live on.

However unlike the preservation of national identity which is politically forged, there is a biological basis behind the preservation of kin. Its an off-tangent topic that's covered in the book The Selfish Gene by R. Dawkins if you're interested.

Back to Merdeka day, how many of us who pass around those patriotic Sudirman songs would spend even a day celebrating our love for our parents? You can see that love for parents and love for country, while similar on the surface, serves different purposes.

This is how I see patriotism.

I go back a hundred years or so when my descendents first arrived on this country's shores. Whatever love my great grannies had for their country was drowned by their desperation to survive. Something drove them to pack up, get on a boat and head out to sea, never to return to their homeland. The inconvenient fact is, I would not be here today had they had stood firmly on the other side and said, "This is MY country. I was born here and no matter what I will die here!"

None of us would be here in fact.

I call this sentimentally noble declaration the burning house declaration because it makes about as much sense as clinging to a house that is engulfed in flames. Yes the house had given you shelter, a garden to grow your food, fond memories etc., but if its burning down and you've chained yourself to the staircase shrieking, "This is MY house! I will never leave!!" then seriously, you need your head examined.

Not all our forefathers came here to escape war and disaster. Some were economic refugees seeking a better life. See the Indons, Burmese, Iranians and Bangladeshis among us today? Ask them why they're here. Whatever it was, one thing we can agree. Everyone in our history were migrants who became "traitors" to their motherland the moment they left its shores for good.

Of course we will never do that, we'll say. We're no traitors. This is our land. We will live and die here.

That's the trouble with humans. We see only what we want to see.

Personally, I do have warm fuzzy feelings for my country of birth so I won't go as far as to say I am unpatriotic. My love is just different than that narrow jingoistic love that's all the rage. I love not only Malaysia but all countries that have contributed to my existence. Let me be honest. If not for my made-in-Taiwan phone and my made-in-Korea TV bouncing their signals off made-in-USA satellites routed to me by made-in-Malaysia companies, whose bills I pay from earnings I made from European, Japanese and Chinese transactions, I would not be who I am today.

I haven't even started on the countries whose extraordinary people gave me great spiritual insight and inspired my meaning in life. All of that, plus my childhood memories that include a weakness for lontong and yong tau foo, shaped me into who I am.

So I'm not so arrogant as to think that I owe it all to one place. On the contrary I shudder to imagine what I would become if I'd never left my tempurung (coconut shell.)

For a couple of decades now, I've been conscious about whittling down overt cravings for identity, be they racial, religious or national, because I know it's all too easy to fall down the slippery slope of bigotry.

My choice is simple: I take the middle path. I agree origins are important but I won't pretend that other places aren't. Places like where I studied, earned my living, helped people, and sought my gurus. If patriotism is about love, then I have to admit that my love is for the world, Malaysia included, because if not for the world, I won't be who I am today.