That Hollow Feeling to the Left

This afternoon, my eldest daughter read the following out loud:

"Do not urge me to leave you, to turn back and not follow you. For wherever you go, I will go; wherever you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus and more may the Lord do to me if anything but death parts me from you.
(Ruth 1:16-17)"


Sometime afterwards (this evening) I was struck that, this chord resonates with my sense of patriotism for America. For the patriot perhaps, America is his Naomi.

I never get this sense from Kerry and the left. The feeling struck up by that powerful phrase is missing from their rhetoric. I, and I feel from browsing around, others on the right, do somtimes try to express this feeling about America. Kerry in his debate, with his worry about "global opinion", about how America must be a respected leader in the global community misses this by as wide a margin as can be imagined.

But, I get that sense sometimes listening to the President. His speech at the convention, and after 9/11. I have never got that sense from Kerry or any of the writings on the left. They may insist that they are patriots. But I think those words hold a different meaning for them than for me.