Ture Patriotism is love of country and a willingness to make it be "all that it can be".

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True Patriotism is NOT:

-love it or leave it attitudes in the face of differences of opinion

-insisting that everything done in the name of a country is right

-believing that any country that does not follow yours is the anti-Christ

patriotism - love and devotion to one's country

I think initially patriotism needs to be modeled and taught.  I think our degree of patriotism is tied to what we have been modelled, taught, and experiences we have been exposed to.  Some teaching . . . and our learning . . . is self-taught, and I think that is where the "what we can do" comes into.  If we have not been taught and modelled patriotism in our home lives and through education, then we need to self-educate ourselves through reading and studying.  I think the degree of our passion of our patriotism is somewhat tied to who and what we are, which is also made up of nature and nuture.

Patriotism is loving your country. Xenophobia or jingoism is when it's necessary to put down or hate other countries in order to love your own. I love America but I seriously respect Canada and can acknowledge that on numerous points you're better than us. I hope we use you as an example and get there ourselves.

I am a proud Canadian.  I love my country.

I support democracy and am willing to defend it.

I am loyal to the Queen And will defend her as per an oath I took 42 years ago.

I am a Democratic  Socialist.

In that order.

I think Robert Heinlein said it best, so here are two excerpts from the Man hisself:

The First:
"The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called 'patriotism.'"

The Second:
I said that "Patriotism" is a way of saying "Women and children first." And that no one can force a man to feel this way. Instead he must embrace it freely. I want to tell about one such man. He wore no uniform and no one knows his name, or where he came from; all we know is what he did.

In my home town sixty years ago when I was a child, my mother and father used to take me and my brothers and sisters out to Swope Park on Sunday afternoons. It was a wonderful place for kids, with picnic grounds and lakes and a zoo. But a railroad line cut straight through it.

One Sunday afternoon a young married couple were crossing these tracks. She apparently did not watch her step, for she managed to catch her foot in the frog of a switch to a siding and could not pull it free. Her husband stopped to help her.

But try as they might they could not get her foot loose. While they were working at it, a tramp showed up, walking the ties. He joined the husband in trying to pull the young woman's foot loose. No luck —

Out of sight around the curve a train whistled. Perhaps there would have been time to run and flag it down, perhaps not. In any case both men went right ahead trying to pull her free ... and the train hit them.

The wife was killed, the husband was mortally injured and died later, the tramp was killed — and testimony showed that neither man made the slightest effort to save himself.

The husband's behavior was heroic ... but what we expect of a husband toward his wife: his right, and his proud privilege, to die for his woman. But what of this nameless stranger? Up to the very last second he could have jumped clear. He did not. He was still trying to save this woman he had never seen before in his life, right up to the very instant the train killed him. And that's all we'll ever know about him.

This is how a man dies.

This is how a man ... lives!"

Fera creates hatred, and therein lies jon's point.  Cut the semantics besh, they are unbecoming of you.

As-salaamu alaikum

-Omni

Patriotism requires a goal for the whole nation, a sense of direction. Right now, Canada does not have one. That's quite evident in our voting.

The US goal is based on an entirely mythical notion of US history, a myth that portrays the US as a leader of freedom, etc. That's rubbish. IT has, ever since 1776, been based on aggression, mass murder, land theft, and exploitation.

I think patriotism means love of country. And just like love amongst people, this can take different forms - some healthy, some less so. It can be controlling, narrow minded, based on fairy tales and myths, or it can be open and honest, constructively critical, but fair in both its criticism and praise. It won't, for example, tar the entirety of the US with one brush because 50% of people who go to the polls buy into a bunch of claptrap. Likewise, it wouldn't tar all Afghanis as card-carrying Taliban and Al Qaeda members, or all Israelis as Zionists. A HEALTHY patriotism, to me, embodies pride, but the kind of pride that keeps eyes open and aspires to more - too proud to settle for 'less than' we can be.

That is precisely what Canadians and Americans have lost. Canada has no sense of its role in the world or of what we want this country to be. That's why the UN turned against us. That's why we don't have anything that can be called a national political party.

The US has it's eyes firmly fixed on an imagined history and a set of ideals that never really existed. There is no general sense of what the US can be, either for itself or for the rest of the world.

Patriotism, to me, is wanting the best for your country and wanting it to be the best it can be. It means being open to both what is good and what is bad about your country and trying to change it for the better. It means wanting change where change is needed, not just trying to keep things as they are. Too often, so-called patriots want to ignore the bad; to paper over the flaws. A true patriot would recognize them, hold them up, and find ways to make things better. If Quebec leaving would make Canada a better place (and I'm not saying it would) then letting them go would be a patriotic act. If becoming a republic would make Canada a better place (and I'm not saying it would) then doing so is a patriotic act.

All that said, we need to move beyond patriotism focussed on one country and start recognizing a higher loyalty which our national patriotism must serve, not resist: a loyalty  to our species, our world, our universe. If these die, then countries are moot. In the end, countries come and go (just look at how many have come, gone, changed names and borders, and so on just in my 45 years) but our species and world will (or should, if we don't f*** things up too badly) go on. Making our country a more just, peaceful, and green place will contribute to this higher goal so the kind of patriotism I describe above is entirely in keeping with this loyalty.

In the end, patriotism is a lot like faith. It can be single-minded, hostile to the other, resistant to change, and ultimately destructive (possibly of our very existence) or it can be a source of strength to help us make our lives and the broader world better. We decide which it is by how we live it.

Mendalla

 unfortunately its definately taght, and I have a hard time explaining to my children what's wrong with it. 

"No Master but God, No Lord but Christ, No Nation but the Kingdom."

welcome femmemomma. may I respectfully ask what religion you are?

I think it would be a disaster for patriotism to be taught. That's where idiots like the tea party group come from. That's where naziism came from. That's why young and poor men fought wars to make money for rich ones. I have never known an example of patriotism being taught for any reason but to break children in to do what their political and economic masters tell them to do. "My country, right or wrong..." That's a copout.

I'm quite happy to be a Canadian. I like to think I would do my best for Canadians. But I don't go around spurting maple leaves. I rarely sing O Canada.  I couldn't care less if Somalia beat Canada in world hockey. And I am certainly not in agreement with the way this country is going.

My country, right or wrong, is something that could have been said by a Christian Nazi. Patriotism should not be one's greatest loyalty.

Teach children to read and write. Let them decided for themselves what they love.