(July 3).
As this wonderful nation prepares to celebrate Independence Day, please forgive me for expressing a bit of righteous contempt for ungrateful Americans who fail to appreciate the blessings we enjoy by virtue of our nationality.
Yes, I know, “contempt” goes beyond ordinary bounds of journalistic perspective. Even an opinion journalist is supposed to remain somewhat dispassionate. But I’ve had it with the malcontents. I’ve had it with their ignorance. I’ve had it with their lack of gratitude. I’ve had it with their whining and moral purblindness. And I’ve especially had more than enough of their warped values.
Item one: The New York Times is out with a video that appears to be an official, institutional editorial position whose whole point is that the idea the U.S. is “the greatest nation on Earth” is “myth,” because America is really “just okay.” Full essays could be written refuting the video’s tendentious cherry-picking of data, its irrelevancies, and its weirdly snarky sense of glee in letting all of us rubes know that our patriotism is both rube-ish and rubbish. For now, let’s be nice and just say the video woefully misses the vast and verdant rain forest not just for the trees but for the shrubs.
The same holds true for the majority in a Gallup poll released this week who do not rate themselves as “extremely proud” to be American, or the 30% who rate themselves “only moderately proud” or worse. This is especially so for the 49% of those aged 18-29 who answered that way, showing again that the most coddled generation in history is also the most likely to be ungrateful for what it has received. They may not value their own freedom, the freedom they enjoy because America is America, but they would be the first to squeal if it were taken away.
The Times video makes much of the fact that other nations enjoy freedom, too. It ignores the fact that, aside from those nations affiliated historically with the British Empire, the only reason all but a few of them (Switzerland, for example) enjoy freedom at all is because the United States provided the model and encouraged it, and later frequently sacrificed blood and treasure so those others would not be enslaved….
[Read the full piece at this link.]
