There is something wrong with America. All you have to do is check on what the schools and universities have been teaching students for the past three generations and you’ll discover it. For lack of a better term, I call it “Antinationalism.” When I was growing up we were all just plain old “Americans.” We saluted the flag, we sang the National Anthem, we said the Pledge of Allegiance (some schools haven’t allowed the pledge for the last 40 years so make that FOUR generations) and we had a moment of prayer before classes began. We celebrated Independence Day as more than just a day off from work to have a picnic. We were proud of our military, we revered our veterans, we thought the policeman was a pretty nice guy and he was looking out for us. We also thought he would put us in jail if we broke the rules.
Perhaps we were naïve. But even so, you cannot deny that we are not just Americans anymore. Our teachers and professors have taught us that America is a bad place. We’ve exploited the world, stealing their resources so that a select group of people could become rich. And that group would be all the white Anglo-Saxon males in this country who are also bigots, racists, and homophobes. That goes for our Founding Fathers also because they had slaves. Well, there’s your proof right there, isn’t it?
So instead of all of us being Americans, we are a conglomerate of hyphenated groups who value their segregation more than any pride in living in this nation. We have Native-Americans, Spanish-Americans, African-Americans, Lesbian-Americans, and Gay-Americans. We have Feminist-Americans and Union-Americans. We have Black Lives Matter and Black Miss America and Black Entertainment TV and Black History Month and the Congressional Black Caucus. Our President urges schools to teach Arabic. We celebrate Cinco de Mayo in our schools, but a kid wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it is expelled. We have Senior-Americans and Millennial-Americans and on and on and on.
Every group has a “cause” and they are all victims. Victims…of what? Of being fortunate enough to have been born in the only truly free country in the world? And how about those rotten slaver owners who signed the Declaration of Independence? The majority of them were lawyers and small business owners and had NO slaves. And those who did, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were opposed to slavery but were prohibited from freeing them because of the preponderance of laws which prohibited freeing slaves. (The laws and financial penalties for freeing slaves comprised thousands of pages of legalese and were as lengthy and complicated as our current IRS codes.) Quite frankly, they couldn’t afford to pay to free their slaves. Thomas Jefferson died owing debts in the order of over two million of today’s dollars.
We have become a nation of splinter groups, each with its narrow and focused agenda. We are no longer, and perhaps have gone too far, to ever return to just being Americans. We are a nation of Antinationalists. That is disheartening and disappointing. And, unfortunately, future generations will pay the price for our self-centered foolishness.
johnbeckmanbooks 