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There
was a time not too long ago when Americans were so patriotic, it was palpable.
You couldn’t throw a rock in any direction without hitting someone with stars
and stripes in their eyes. There was a near unanimous belief that we were the
shining city upon a hill, and that we were and always would be the greatest
nation on Earth. While it was mostly found among conservatives, it did cross
party lines to some extent. It was so pervasive that anyone who didn’t believe
it was pegged an extremist, or just plain weird.
But
now? Not so much. The sentiment is still there I suppose, but you can almost
feel it evaporating a little bit every day. The pride Americans feel for their
country is slipping away, and is now an undeniable fact. ZeroHedge recently
posted a poll from the World Values Survey, which reveals the precipitous
decline of our national pride. In terms of patriotism, we’ve fallen beneath the
likes of Mexico, Rwanda, and Armenia.
Only
56% of Americans said they were “very proud” of their nation,
according to World Values Survey data, down from over 62%
in 2009 (71.1% in 2004, and 77% in 1999). Behind nations such as Libya, Nigeria,
Egypt, and Poland, ‘exceptional’ America now ranks only 30th in the
world for national pride…
Depending
on who you ask, this is either a good thing or a bad thing. I could definitely
see this in a negative light.
For
the percentage of American’s who are “very proud” of their country to drop from
77% to 56% in less than 2 decades, means something awful must have happened
during those years.
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We’ve
seen our nation become mired in numerous conflicts around the world, and we
can’t help but notice that our government lied to get us there.
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We’ve
also watched helplessly as our jobs were shipped overseas and our standard of
living was decimated.
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We’ve
witnessed the rise of a financial elite who cannot be punished.
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And
finally, the American public is starting to wake up to the fact that they live
in the kind police state that previous generations warned them
about.
In
that respect, our declining national pride is not a good thing. It’s symptomatic
of how far we’ve fallen.
At the
same time though, I’m seeing this glass half full.
Americans
have been very naive for a long time.
Our
government has been rotten to the core for decades, and we’ve been sending our
kids to war for the benefit of the banking class and the military-industrial
complex, since before those words were invented.
It’s
hard to say when it happened, but somewhere along the line we became a nation of
mostly good people led by narcissistic psychopaths, and it’s been that way for
longer than most folks think.
The
only difference is that we’re just now realizing it.
That
small but growing number of Americans who don’t have pride in their nation, are
not a bunch of flag burners.
·
They’re
awake.
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They
see the system for what it is and they’re not willing to gloss over the crimes
of the past or the present.
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They
know that America has a bad seed that’s been growing for generations, strangling
what righteous qualities we have left.
So if
you’re reading this and you happen to agree, rest assured that you’re not as
alone as you think you are.
Those
of us who have justifiable reasons to lack pride in our nation are not a
minority of extremists.
We
actually love America, or at least, what America was supposed to be.
But we
know that nation is very nearly gone, and has been replaced with something
despicable.
We
simply see the truth, and that truth is finally spreading far and
wide.
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