During
my childhood, February always ranked as the most patriotic month. In
school, we seemed to spend forever cutting out silhouettes of Lincoln
and smearing brown Crayolas over our wobbly drawings of log cabins. No
sooner had the library paste dried than it was time for cherry trees,
hatchets and pictures of George Washington with his funny ponytail and
grim smile.
Be all that as it may, I got thinking about whether I am really
patriotic. And that’s when I decided we need a new word; so I coined
one.
Matriotic.
Now think about it. “Patriotic,” of course, comes from the Latin pater,
meaning father. A patriot is one “who loves and loyally or zealously
supports his own country” or fatherland. A perfectly good word for a
perfectly good feeling.
“Matriotic,” by analogy, comes from the Latin mater. A matriot then, is one who loves and loyally or zealously supports her motherland, her own planet - Mother Earth.
The two words are not perfectly analogous, fortunately, otherwise
people might see conflict of interest where there is none. Patriotism,
as we use the word, is about the flag, the government, and the history
of a nation - in our case, the Bill of Rights, free elections and the
peaceful transfer of power (even after a national trauma like Watergate
or the Iran-Contra Affair).
Matriotism, on the other hand, is yin to patriotism’s yang. It’s
about the Earth, not the world. It’s about what those fortunate few
have seen from spaceship portals, not what we see on a map or a globe
with regularly updated borderlines and political color-coding.
Matriotism is about one sun by day and one moon by night - a moon
that waxes and wanes and marks months and menses whether you live in
Moscow, Idaho, or Moscow, Texas. It’s about what human beings have felt
since the dawn of time when they lay on their backs on the ground and
looked up at floating clouds or glittering stars.
Patriotism has always had a lot of the zest of competition in it -
rival teams, us and them, Britain’s battles being won on the playing
fields of Eton, and all that. My country, right or wrong. My country
over the other countries.
Matriotism, by contrast, recognizes that while there may be six-
or seven-score fatherlands, there is only one motherland. There are
political divisions that have risen, prospered, and utterly vanished,
civilizations and great cities that are no more. But while we have her,
there is only one Mother Earth.
She’s done a little rearranging from time to time, what with
volcanoes and earthquakes and such. But last spring, I stood on a
grassy meadow in England and was informed that the same trees I was
seeing, the same boulders, the same stream, had been seen and touched
by Anglo-Saxons, by Romans and by Stone Age Brits.
Many cultures, patriots of many nations - but one earth. Some call her Spaceship Earth today.
So it’s not either-or; it’s not a matter of patriotism vs.
matriotism. It’s just a matter of bringing our matriotism a little more
to the forefront, perhaps.
For instance, we could start with a holiday. A matriotic holiday,
a worldwide day of celebration, gratitude, and rededication to the
planet. We’d need a flag, of course, and we’d need a song - an anthem,
really.
Wouldn’t it be quite a feeling to have an international anthem
(no, not the Internationale) that little kids all over the world would
learn to sing about the oceans and the mountains and the sands and the
snows of Earth?
We could certainly work up a pledge of allegiance: “I pledge
allegiance to the soil, and to the air we breathe, to every species
beneath the sun….”
We’d certainly need a Matriots’ Hall of Fame someplace - maybe
onboard a ship that would sail from country to country, celebrating the
great matriots who fought for Mother Earth, whether by saving the
whales and the gorillas and the snail darters, or by engineering new
strains of seed that would feed more on less, or by finding the key to
practical mass use of solar energy instead of fossil fuels - and so on.
Some people might not get too excited about being matriotic,
seeing that it lacks that old competitive edge. On the other hand,
remember what Walt Kelly’s cartoon possum Pogo said: “We have met the
enemy, and they is us.” This fight to save Mother Earth could end up
the biggest battle of all. Elouise Bell is professor emeritus of
English at Brigham Young University, a syndicated columnist and the
author of Only When I Laugh (Signature Books), from which this article
was excerpted. Book excerpt
Matriotism’s Hall of Fame
Earth Island Journal is compiling an on-line version of the Matriot’s Hall of Fame at www.earthisland.org/eijournal/journal.cfm .
Please join us in this attempt to honor the courageous matriots who
have given their talents, their love and, at times, their very lives,
to protect and defend this planet.
Rachel Carson Dian Fosey Judi Bari Wangari Maathai Winona
LaDuke Arundhati Roy Donella Meadows Vandana Shiva Helen
Caldicott Francis Moore Lappé Petra Kelly Medha Petkar Julia
“Butterfly” Hill Anne Brower Amy Goodman Carolyn Merchant Hazel
Wolf Digna Ochoa Lois Gibbs Karen Silkwood Cindy Duerhling
Neta Golan Terri Swearingen Sylvia Earle Rosalie Edge Sylvia
McLaughlin Starhawk David Brower John Muir Aldo Leopold Chico
Mendes Ken Saro-Wiwa Anil Agarwal Jacques-Yves Cousteau Carl
Sagan Ed Abbey David “Gypsy” Chain Berito Kuwaru’wa Ka Hsaw Wa
Rodolfo Montiel Flores and Teodora Cabrera Paul Watson Huey
Johnson Gaylord Nelson Ponderosa Pine William Penn Mott And all
of the Goldman Environmental Award Winners and the nearly 700
recepients of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Global
500 Award.
We welcome further nominations. Please send your suggestions to gsmith@earthisland. Results will be posted online.
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