'My father's a drunkard and my mother's a whore'

"But they're still my parents." A bit like that I suppose. You don't love your parents because of their merits or dislike them because of their faults. They're your parents and you just love them. Full stop. Love of country is a bit similar. I feel much the same way about my country that you do about yours and I ache when I have my face rubbed daily into what has happened to it. (For the record, my parents are both gone. My father was not a drunkard and my mother was not a whore. They had their merits and they had their faults. But neither has much to do with why I loved them or my missing them to this day. ditto feelings about the land of the free and the home of the brave. ) SR