AJC.com > Blogs > Get Schooled > Archives > 2007 > July > 04 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USA Patriotic Break
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When I was 18 years old, I bought a backpack, a cheap plane ticket on Pakistan International Airlines and set off with my older sister to see Europe.
It was the first time I had traveled overseas, and one of the first things I learned was a bit of a curiosity. Everywhere we went, Canadians always displayed their flag, usually in the form of a patch on their backpacks.
Why? Well, I was told, they didn’t want to be mistaken for Americans.
This was a rude awakening — the first time I learned how much the rest of the world, or at least a good chunk of it, hated the United States.
One day, my sister and I wandered into a pizza joint just off the main square in Prague. This was the summer of 1992 and the Olympics were being broadcast on a TV inside.
My memory’s a bit cloudy, so I can’t remember exactly what part of the games we were watching. But I’ll never forget how proud I felt hearing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and watching the American flag being raised during a medal ceremony.
I can still see myself standing there, staring up at the TV, transfixed. To this day, the memory brings tears to my eyes. After weeks of being cast as the hated, ugly American, I knew — for the first time, really — what patriotism truly felt like.
Now that’s something you just can’t learn in school.
Comments
By SET
July 5, 2007 11:44 AM | Link to this
You can learn patriotism in school. It all starts by learning US History. But the History being taught is largely the “hate whitey” realspeak heavy on the moral relativitity and multiculturalism.
No other nation built such an infrastructure, invented technology or established wealth and political freedoms for so many people and for so many waves of immigrants either for that matter.
One can argue that we are busy throwing away the levers we used to do this. And I do so argue. You cannot have prosperity when you have a death spiral of tax increases for welfare and imperial extravaganzas and you cannot have domestic peace when the Feds pay low IQ people to breed unwanted and undisciplined children.
When I was in primary school - and in HS - we were shown that the US is the greatest and most dynamic country ever known (Gee, just like Rome at it’s peak) with studies of accomplishments from everybody such as Edison and Ford to the (German?) Jewish A-Bomb scientists to the Chinese laborers who built the western railroads under the direction of the Big 4 (Stanford, Crocker, etc) to the construction of the Hoover Dam and the Interstate Freeway System, and so on, for years of school study. Blacks and women appeared on occasion in industry and science - but there was no glorification of race hustlers of any race.
We also covered history or other nations for comparison. The mud huts of Africa, the squalor of India, the faded empire of the UK, the mass murder of Stalin, the failed Chinese Cultural Revolution, you know the drill. 1st world, 2nd world, 3rd world. That was in the the 1960’s.
Things have changed. Now we have a Brave New World where out elected leaders are merging our population with Mexico’s cast offs, ignore the Constitutional Limits on Federal Power and above all, suppress free speech and lie to the public about everything from the amount of money in circulation (US recently stopped publishing M3 numbers) to the failure of foreign expeditions.
Either way, patriotism begins with early education. It used to be taught in school. Civics classes have been stopped and twisted in order to prepare the proletariat for what’s coming for them. - Hey- but I could be wrong…