Totally unrelated, but I just last week did say I loved being an American and love this country yet immediately I got shunned for being a crazy right-wing conservative. I'm like what??! So I can see how thought leaders in this space are keeping quiet waiting for the hypersensitivity to cool off.
I love my country and appreciate my culture. In fact, America's melting pot is just lovely to me because I get to experience such a breadth of the world and people from within it. And don't get me started on breathy jazz in a repurposed southern home, eating pecan pie with the smell of magnolias and the chirping of the cicadas.
Just because I can recognize negatives and discuss the topic from an anthropological perspective doesn't mean I'm "demotivated"?
Though I do wish we brought back American Exceptionalism in the sense of building ornate mega structures and taking on huge infrastructure projects. Not that it's totally dead, but building wide and a resurrection of fiscal conservativism has severely crippled it.
It is super-sad, yet quintessentially USA: literally dying, for a political class who don't care about you, over principles rooted in selfishness. Can you get any more American than that?
You're being downvoted, but having grown up between conservative enclaves (overseas military base, Texas A&M) and ultra progressive domains (years in NYC and Seattle), I've seen firsthand, without choosing a side, that patriotism and apologism has very much become an American Right wing position, while those on the left are increasingly ashamed of the American flag. Particularly since the election of Trump.
Thanks for being honest. I find your comments fascinating.
You mention, in passing, how immigrants are making the country worse because they are left-leaning. The left-leaning behaviors you mention are a disregard for the environment (?), being concerned with one’s own family and fortunes (??) and mocking traditional American foods (???).
Even if these things are happening but what does this have to do with being left-wing? The myopic mall-goers sound more like suburban GOP types. And who is mocking hamburgers and meatloaf? That sounds like a white college student to me.
Lastly - I think it’s a dubious proposition that America single-handedly brought democracy to the world, but there’s no question that it was an important step in human political evolution.
But that’s because the USA is uniquely blind to ethnicity, religion, and origin, defining government as the guardian of everyone’s liberty. Probably everything you cherish as all-American is a direct result of that attitude, including hamburgers and meatloaf.
America, so far, has been really good at turning newcomers into Americans - or turning America into someplace that values what the newcomers brought. Why are you losing faith in this now?
The phenomenon where people like you act as if anyone with something critical to say about the United States lacks patriotism is the very thing that is destroying our nation. I'm a moderate conservative and a Soldier, but your "love it or leave it" attitude is sickening to me. Its ruining our country, so please stop.
Sure many countries are horrible places to live compared to the United States, but if we ignore our problems as you would have us do, that might not always be the case.
Our founding fathers knew from the very start that government is but a necessary evil. One that requires constant monitoring and modification in order to keep the power in the hands of the American people, which is where it belongs. Patriotism is about loving one's country, not worshipping the government.
I don't agree with every criticism of the United States that appeared in this thread, but I do agree with some of them.
Aside: As a European, it scares and amuses me to no end how the American discourse has become a complete Left vs Right, black vs white, us vs them. I'm not even that old, and I remember when being so politically polarised and eager to fit people and the world in two small boxes was something you'd only hear from drunken lunatics at a bar. These days, it's every-fucking-where on the Internet because y'all can't bloody stop talking about your politics.
I say that in the most polite way possible: you Americans have a lot of internal issues you need to sort out, and quickly. You're polluting the rest of the world with your party politics.
If you are an American and you are professing hate for America (as many in this thread are) I feel bad for you.
This is my home and I love it here. America has made mistakes, it will make more, it has corrupt people, evil people, good people, inventive people, thieving people but it's contributed quite a lot to this world socially, technologically and in many other ways.
I find this entire hate for America thing shallow, short-sided, ignorant and deeply disturbing and have very little use for people who professes this sentiment.
I have to admit that especially in Germany there is a huge, huge bias (from our news media) towards pointing the USA as a nation of radical right-wing retards.
US-related news here is mainly about: Tea Party, gun violence, wars, more Tea Party, corruption and dumbness on both popular parties, sheer political idiocy (sequester), and a record amount of bigotry throughout the society.
To the USA: deal with your external image before starting to whine when other people laugh at you.
I loathe so much about my America's politics right now, but the US is not the source of all negative political activity. It's such a broad, incorrect assertion on its face.
As an American from birth, and speaking for myself, it's not hating my country. It's frustration and sometimes anger at our failure to do better. I believe that doing better than we are is within our grasp, but we, as a nation, so often seem to turn away from positive change in favor of a comfortable and easy (for many Americans) status quo that is ultimately inadequate and often blindly hypocritical.
It is just horrific to watch the unfolding of everything that gives us a competitive edge and makes this country stand out. At the same time watching people cheer it.
We are sending our best and brightest into the welcoming arms of the competition. And I don’t mean this in a good guy bad guy way, more in the sense of healthy competition between sports teams.
We already know about the countless contributions of
Immigrants, even when it comes to job creation from immigrant founded companies. As we turn them away, we continue to dissolve into unprecedented dysfunction, at a time that we most need to attract that energy to get us out of this nasty rut.
As an immigrant who came here from India at age 12, this is home. And it’s sad to see your home being eaten into by politically motivated termites and rotting at every level at the core, while many of my fellow Americans cheer it on our self-destruction.
I think that probably most US Americans would agree that it is, but mostly that's just because all people are indoctrinated into local patriotism. For whatever reasons you consider your country to be great, those reasons would apply to us as well.
People, by and large, root for the home team.
In America especially, our history books are filled with our victories, and how our revolution framed this great nation, while simultaneously omitting the horrors we committed against Native Americans. We're raised to sing "My Country Tis of Thee" and sing the Star Spangled Banner before sporting events.
We're taught about our Constitution, and our Constitutional rights, and for sure, we're taught that democracy is better than monarchies, dictatorships, patriarchies, and non-representative forms of government. If you ask anybody over the age of, say 35, how they feel about communism or socialism, they would undoubtedly tell you that it's evil. They grew up in the aftermath of the cold war, and all the popular media at the time was about spying on mother Russia, and all that nonsense. We had Rocky IV, Red Dawn, etc. I do not know, but I suspect that all localities do this, whether subconsciously or purposefully I don't know, but I believe that all people are indoctrinated to what's nearby.
For these same reasons, most people, generally speaking, adopt the religions of their parents, etc., etc.
Whether or not we'd be better off is an entirely different conversation, and there's no way that we can really know for sure, but if you ask 100 Americans, I'd be surprised if less than 98 of them told you that would in fact, be the most terrible thing in the history of terribleness, right or wrong.
From the outside, the way American politics divides people is strange. The psychology of republicans vs democrats, tpartiers vs big staters seems more like the supporters of a sports team.
When you support a sports team, if your player blatantly breaks the rules, you curse when he gets penalized. However badly they perform, you say they are unlucky and will win next season. When you watch a match with other fans, you feel like you are part of a clan, you feel a sense of belonging. Some people support terrible teams because they like that feeling, and they enjoy getting angry at the other team and its supporters. Sometimes they enjoy it so much they have riots, or at least a punch up.
I'm not saying America is unique, and the... sad cynicism you see in other countries is it's own evil. It's just a bit scary watching the fate of the world be decided like a bar room sports argument.
I guess this comment is a dumb generalization, but that debt ceiling thing really freaked me out.
I can't find a point in history where the extreme left produced anything else than doom.
As someone who grew up in a poor Eastern European country, I felt both envy and admiration for the US. I thought the Americans had best of everything. US seemed like an ideal in many senses.
20 or 30 years later, I feel grateful we still have families, traditions, respect for ourselves and a way of life which can lead to moments of happiness. All of these are under pressure from self appointed far left elites trying to "civilize" and "westernized" us. I hope they won't succeed and that the West is starting to come back to it's lost senses. A civilization built in thousands of years shouldn't be destroyed in few tens of years by madmen and lunatics.
I will happily accept all downvotes, but I rather get downvotes then not say what I feel.
I love this country like I love my favorite sports team: It's not blind love - I crap on them when they deserve it.
That being said this country is slowly dying from extreme left wing ideologies.
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