Small Town Patriotism
Your town needs you, not your nation
“Your town needs you, not your nation.”
That statement might sound very unpatriotic, anti-American in fact. But it’s not. It’s the most patriotic stance you could take.
You are one person. Most individuals have minimal reaches of influence. For a father of a young family, for example, that reach might stop at the door to the outside (well, if he lets it). Of course, there are some, a very minute number, who have significant ranges of influence, but those, and we know who they are, aren’t the topic here. Nor are those who’ve decided not to have kids. It’s you. The everyday mom and dad. The ones who chose to be invested in the future of humanity by bringing the next generation of life into it. Not those who have opted out.
So what can one dad or mom do? A lot, actually.
The sphere of influence of your typical parent is certainly small, yet it can be powerful. Of course, the first band contains your home, your kids. How you raise them. How you design your home, your property, wherever you choose to have your home; whether in town, right outside of town, or further away off a rural country road. That choice of location feeds into a lot of what happens around you, but no matter where it is, you still have influence.
This first band of influence is most important. It’s where most of the magic occurs. It has the greatest impact on your children and your families future. That’s why your choice of where you have your home, what you do with the land you have, how you design the indoor and outdoor world around your home, and how you orchestrate daily life for everyone there, matters more than anything else.
Building on this foundation, the second band of influence includes those immediately around you, which, of course, depends on where you choose to root your home. Because this band includes your direct neighbors. They could be extended family, ideally, or strangers (at first). But they are those in closest proximity to you and your children’s daily life, and after you and your spouse, have the next level of influence on them. And the same goes for your influence on their lives, and their kids’ lives, for you are potentially the next band of influence on them.
The third band of influence encompasses your town, your parish, the local school (if your kids go there), the land your town manages, the homes and architecture it preserves, the library it runs. This could also be where your work is located, your business, and if it’s not a remote job you’re involved with, where your work should ideally be, not in some far away city. Though regardless of that, your influence here shapes the very world your kids are going to grow up in. Where, if you’re lucky and all goes to plan, your grandchildren (or more) will grow up in.
Just as the influence of the town and all the entities within it shape you, and more so your kids, this is where all the hard work you’ve done at home gets transferred to others; to your parish, to your community. This is where you submit to God at your parish, influencing others to do the same. Where when you walk into your local hardware store and everyone knows your name, your kids names, and you end up helping an elderly town resident load his truck with bags of water softener for his well system. Then help him again when he gets home.
Yet that has become the most neglected band of them all.
Then there are the fourth and fifth bands of influence, the county and state levels, respectively, but these aren’t where you’re needed right now, so no focus will be paid to them, nor will I even bring up the sixth band. These larger scales dilute individual impact, pulling energy from where it counts most.
Though there is a seventh band of influence, but not in the hierarchical sense, more in the abstract, for this is the band of influence present across social media like X, Instagram, etc. For they can interestingly have pseudo-local town-level influence through the existence of town and community groups, such as on Facebook, but that’s not the focus of this essay, for while a viral post feels empowering, it rarely plants roots like volunteering at your local church. Your comments on a post decrying some town ordinance have no impact on the actual town you live in, just your existence in the town that occurs in your own mind.
The focus here is on the personal interaction and involvement with your town, your neighbors, and your family within it. Which brings us back to the premise of this essay.
The most patriotic act you can take today is focusing your energies of influence on your local town community. These small towns in America are what made America so great to begin with, and they will again. You need to be fervently patriotic about your town. You should be invested in how it’s managing its land, the zoning laws, the decisions being made at school boards, what’s going on at your church, how the local pub owner is doing. All these things, and many more, have a direct impact on the fitness of your children and the next generation as a whole that grow up in the town.
Is it going to be a town that supports them and builds them up too? Providing opportunities to apprentice, learn, work, participate in the social and economic fabric of the small town society? Or will it shun them, or provide nothing of use to them, or nothing to desire a return to if they decide to go off somewhere for a period of time
The greatest measure of a town may not be based on those who stay, but by those who return and raise their families there too, choosing to continue the generational line in their hometown after seeing and experiencing the world at large.
So why decry time- and effort-consuming patriotism towards our nation?
Well, it’s like the old man shouting at clouds: nothing you say or do will have any impact. That’s not defeatism; it’s recognition of your actual place in society. Some might call this isolationist, but it’s the opposite, strong towns build strong nations from the ground up. And for the massive majority of you, it’s in your town and your district. Your patriotic fervor should be expressed there, where you can have an actual impact; improve your town, improve the pathways and opportunities of those who live there, increasing the fitness of your own family living there, along with all the others in your secondary and tertiary levels of influence; which in turn, combined with all the other parents doing the same thing in towns across your county, state, and the nation, will lead to an upward trajectory of prosperity and indirect patriotism that will restore the engine of American dynamism once again. This is subsidiarity at its core: solving problems at the lowest effective level, closest to the people affected.
You see, spending your days watching the news, posting on X about national or cultural matters, championing or decrying policies the federal or even the state government is parroting, is wasted energy focused on the immovable, unstoppable machine that is, well, whatever you want to call it, for it’s truly an amalgamation of many things. Instead, turn away from all that, at least most of it, and turn towards your town. Your actual people. The ones you and your kids, and great-grandkids will interact with on daily basis and influence in daily lives now and yet to come. And, ultimately, the future of our nation that has yet to be. But no matter what comes of this nation, or the next, at least your town will forever have the imprint of your existence in it, literally felt by your own blood, for many generations to come.
So start today. Attend that town meeting. Accept that role on the zoning committee. Bring your kids to the next food drive at your church. Start the downtown bakery you’ve always dreamt of. Be the patriot your hometown deserves.
Thank you for being here with us.
.
Great read and premise
Foreigner ask - can it stop those russians?