Don_DickleI am an American. I used to be proud of my country. Now it feels like a turd circling the drain. Is there anything going on behind the scene that America is actually doing good in?
Just like being proud of your family means helping them do their best, being proud of your country is a duty to understand what it does well and poorly, and do whatever you can to help it do its best. I’m proud of the mythology we’ve built around the US being the “good guys”, so it’s my duty to call it out when it doesn’t live up to its ideals, and do whatever I can to help it move in the direction of those ideals. If we’re not the first to call out the gaps, then we have failed our country/family/city/corp, and our pride is meaningless blind obedience
NONE of these cases should be blind trust or blind love.
That would be the healthy way of looking at it, but sadly isn’t the case for most who are “proud of their country.” The reality is that many just feel proud because they are told to, because it’s pushed onto them from the moment they attend school (the Pledge of Allegiance every day in class is an example of this). Being proud of one’s country for the sake of it just breeds nationalism, which just breeds extremism.