As we celebrate Independence Day and feel our hearts swell with pride while we listen to the National Anthem, and gaze at red, white and blue fireworks displays, we ponder what it means to be an American.

By Charles "Chick" Cleveland, Lieutenant General, USAF, retired

It is altogether fitting and proper that we take time and examine our feelings of patriotism, which has generally been a positive force in history, especially the American version. But it can also be a dangerous force, as it was in Nazi Germany when the natural love of country got all mixed up with the poison of the Master Race theory. So we should try to understand our feelings of patriotism, not just experience them.

Why does the flag, and the National Anthem, and America the Beautiful bring a rush of pride, sometimes even tears to our eyes? Certainly because we love our country, but it is so much more than that. We as Americans are more than just the products of our emotions, and we can be secure in our patriotic feelings because they stem from an underlying rational basis.

As people, many different and conflicting forces drive our actions. First, our personal, or social, considerations -- such as our drive for personal freedom, our urge to conform, the instinct for survival, and our pure emotions. Secondly, our spiritual needs, like our desire for dignity, respect, a feeling of self-worth, service to a higher cause or higher being, a spirit of sacrifice, and our search for identity. Of course there are other factors, economic and political, that drive our behavior. But to analyze patriotism, it is most instructive to think in terms of the personal values and the other higher values of the human spirit. Some of the purest strains of these motivations are distilled into what we feel as patriotism.

We Americans are particularly fortunate, and looking at the genesis of our patriotism, we can see why. In the short history of our county, we were born in revolution and fragmented from the beginning by the very diversity of our roots. In the early days, our instinctive quest for identity, the need to identify with an idea greater than ourselves, and our innate spirit of service, helped spawn one of the most natural of historical movements --- an identification with our country. In all lands and in all ages, there has been love of country. But, while in the case of most other major countries, which just sort of assumed that their existence was directed and ratified by their gods and history, our beginnings were different. Our land was made up of people from many different countries. But we were not so much just the recipients of those people --- the colonists, the immigrants, the slaves --- we were the recipients of their ideas. The basis of our dominant religion came from Palestine, our form of government from Greece and England, our laws from Rome, our feeling for freedom from the many oppressed people we took to our shores, and those, I might add, who were already here.

So we did not develop just as a happening or an accident -- we found a national purpose that history had not known before, a reason for our existence that represented the best hope of the world for personal freedom. Our nation was conceived in liberty, as Jefferson said -- and so what we have is a great juxtaposition of the spiritual values of service to a higher cause, sacrifice, and love of country that are inherent in the usual patriotism, allied closely with the priceless personal values of freedom and individuality. So in the United States, national existence and national purpose became indistinguishable.

I do not apologize for one instant for my feelings of patriotism. In my view they represent one of the grandest, purest, most noble motivations of human behavior. General McArthur said, "The soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind." It is all too easy to forget that the single most important social program the government has is to ensure the security of its citizens.

In defense of our national purpose, not many of us will have the opportunity to play a part in a dramatic spectacle. Our roles as citizens will more likely be acted out in the quiet forum of daily individual commitment in which we live our lives with integrity, with a love for our country, and with a strong belief in the principles on which this nation was founded.

Some of the most meaningful words in this regard ever written were by John Stuart Mill, an Englishman who was an apostle of the idea of individual freedom tempered by responsibility. He wrote during, and about, the American Civil War:

War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things.

The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing is worth war is much worse.

A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares more about than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free,

Unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

General Charles "Chick" Cleveland, was born in Honolulu one of two sons of an active duty Army officer. His journey begans in Hawaii. Upon his father's untimely death, "Chick" (a nickname rising out the gallant history of the men who fought the Civil War battle of Chickamogua at a Tennesee creek by the same name) returned with his mother and brother to the New York farm of his grandfather.

General Cleveland graduated from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, N.Y., He earned his master's degree in political science at Xavier University, in Cincinnati, Ohio and completed Harvard University's Advanced Management Program.

During his 35 year military career, General Cleveland served in combat during two wars. In the Korean War he flew F-86 fighter aircraft. He shot down four MIG-15s and is credited with an additional two "probably destroyed" and four "damaged." During the Vietnam War, he served as executive assistant to General William Westmoreland, the commanding general of all allied forces fighting North Vietnam.

In the early 1980s, General Cleveland retired from from his last assignment as Commander of USAF Air University. He remained in Montgomery where he continues to serve his country and community.

He has served as Executive Director of the Montgomery Area United Way, Commissioner of the State of Alabama's Department of Human Resources and is the founding chairman of SAYNO, the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization. He is also involved in numerous civic and professional organizations including serving as co-chairman of the Alabama World Affairs Council.