Summer Song Challenge, Day 37: Pat

Prompt: "A song that feels patriotic"

Selected by Pat

"Solidarity Forever"

Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers

Talking Union, 1941

The first draft of this post was a long, bloated mess that included quotes from MLK and Bakunin. So I shaved it down to my main points. That way everyone can get back to their barbecues.

1. A part of patriotism is recognizing when your country has fallen short of its own ideals.
2. The United States purports to guarantee rights and privileges to its residents (i.e. constitutional rights, life/liberty/pursuit of happiness, "freedom," etc.). This guarantee of rights and privileges is one of the most admirable things about this country.
3. In practice, the United States has failed to deliver on these guarantees, both intentionally and unintentionally.
4. A large part of the unintentional failure is due to a lack of means and opportunity—economic, geographic, and social—for residents to fully exercise their rights (i.e. having to live paycheck to paycheck and a lack of affordable housing is generally not conducive to civic participation).
5. Besides fighting intentional disenfranchisement, we should demand a stronger social safety net. Not simply because it would be good, but because such support is absolutely necessary to enable the exercise of rights and privileges already promised to us.
6. Individual action is mostly ineffective. Group action is needed. Large scale solidarity is necessary to achieve large scale goals.
7. Solidarity also enables justice, since a threat to one part is met with a response from the whole (i.e. bad laws in Florida are a problem for people in Pennsylvania, too, and should be addressed as such).
8. If you threaten to move to Canada every time the U.S. does something you disagree with, you are probably an asshole.
9. Pete Seeger was a real one.