Katha Pollitt

I want to focus on the question of patriotism. If an American child and a Peruvian child were drowning, would you rush to save the American child first? If you were in charge of feeding an international crowd of travelers stranded by a disaster, would you give the Americans extra pie? Would you refuse on principle to marry a foreigner? Of course not. In our lives as individuals we would find it unfair, bigoted, even bizarre, to give automatic preference to another American. What about fairness, equality, merit, relative need, and simple human feeling? But when one speaks not of Americans but of “The United States of America” everything changes.