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submaleinzona -> RE: americanness (2/26/2009 9:28:57 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: sravaka
Ok. I have a question.
I come here semi-often, and read the political threads, and have my own thoughts about them.... but i'll put said thoughts aside to ask this:
Where [on earth] do you [whoever you may be] get your ideas of what "being American" is/means?
Well, I'm new to this forum, but I've been an American all my life. Being American can mean a lot of different things depending on the context (assuming you mean more than just U.S. citizenship).
quote:
I have my own ideas of what this (Americanness) entails.... and don't claim that mine is any more or less valid than yours-- after all, we all have passports, don't we? (parenthetical intentionally left blank)
Be honest, please. Where do your ideas come from? From your parents? From your early education (please specify)? From life experience processed later in the game? What?
From a Chevrolet commercial I remember as a kid. It had a little jingle which went, "Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet."
Seriously, much of my view of "Americanness" was from my parents. My grandparents were also pretty big influences on me, so their views of America tended to rub off on me. One set of grandparents were staunch Republicans from the Midwest, and my other set of grandparents were staunch Democrats from California. Both sets of grandparents were patriotic Americans in their own way, especially since they all lived through World War II and then the Cold War. Patriotism was practically mandatory. My father told me a lot of stories from that era as well.
I grew up in neighborhoods where practically every house would display the flag on Flag Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, etc. A few people display the flag every day. Some still do, like my father.
One thing that my grandfather (the Democratic one from California) instilled into me very early in life is, whenever I didn't want to eat everything on my plate at mealtime, he would go into a long lecture about how so many children around the world are starving and how glad they'd be to have what we have here in America. So, out of a sense of guilt he instilled into me, I ended up eating something I didn't want to because of the starving children all over the world. (I never could understand that logic, actually.) He was one of those grandfathers who always complained about how we kids "have it too easy." (He was right.) He was a Democrat and tended to sympathize with working people, which is his reason for supporting the Democratic Party in the first place.
My other grandparents didn't trust the Democrats at all. They were Republicans mainly out of tradition. But they made a real big deal out of the Fourth of July in some of those small towns. Those were some of my fondest memories as a child, going to family reunions at my dad's hometown in Minnesota. The whole town in a festival spirit - everyone knows each other or is related to someone. A big picnic where all our relatives gathered in prayer in honor of our nation's birth and to thank God that we are part of a great nation. It was fun, and it gives one a warm feeling inside.
Of course, this was in the late 1960s/early 1970s, which was a rather tumultuous time in our history (as I later came to find out). I was just a kid at that time, so I didn't really grasp what was going on until a few years later.
One thing that was also important on both sides of my family was one's family tree and family "tenure" within America. My maternal grandmother's family was very much into that, and they even had a book with our family's coat of arms in it. They didn't come over on the Mayflower, but they arrived a few years after that in what is now the state of Maryland. My paternal grandfather was of French lineage and was always proud of the French contribution to the American Revolution and with Lafitte's help during the Battle of New Orleans.
Oh, and of course, many in my age group also grew up with songs like "The Battle of New Orleans" and the "Ballad of Davey Crockett."
quote:
I think most of the conflicts come down to this. (Hint: conservatives, liberals, and liberatarians alike are all convinced that they alone are true to "Americanness")
I have no delusions that these conflicts can be resolved, but I'd very much like to understand their sources better, and will appreciate any input.
They're all Americans. America started out as a divided nation in many respects.
I also remember conflict when I was younger. People were upset over Watergate, Vietnam. Conservatives would rail against the "pinkos" and "liberals" and called them "un-American." And a lot of these divisions were evident within the Democratic Party, which tends to be full of contradictions anyway.
But on the other side of that, liberals were arguing that what our government was doing both domestically and around the world, was what was truly "un-American." So, the argument is always going to be a bit fuzzy, and it really depends upon one's values or point of view.
The Cold War also added another dimension to it all, since we were stockpiling nuclear weapons to protect the Free World from the Communist Bloc. When I was in high school in the early 1980s, Reagan was President at the time. I was in Arizona by that time, and there are a lot of retirees and WW2 vets (but not as many as there used to be). One was a retired Brigadier General who served under MacArthur in the Philippines. He was an interesting guy. He came to our history class one day and showed us a film from the American Conservative Union advocating "Peace Through Strength," which was essentially Reagan's policy at the time. It was pure propaganda, though, as it was talking about the Soviets were coming to get us. They got Cuba, then Nicaragua, and then, they would get Mexico and then the United States. That's what this film was trying to convey.
I remember questions being phrased in such a way as, "Are you in favor of the President's Strategic Defense Initiative, or, like the Communists, are you against it?" I even recall when those who were against aid to the Nicaraguan Contras were called "traitors." That kind of talk can get pretty ugly, actually.
Politics is a dirty business. (That was another one of my grandfather's favorite sayings.) They're going to use whatever trick in the book to win the election. They're mostly panderers. They'll just tell people what they want to hear.
The average conservative or liberal is pretty much just that. They believe what they believe, they both think they're right, and they consider themselves moral, decent, compassionate, and honorable. But they'll associate their ideological opponent with the worst thing in the world.
So, I don't know. Things are feeling a bit dicey these days. Hard to tell which way the wind is going to blow.
A line from Three Days of the Condor: "Ask 'em when they're running out. Ask 'em when there's no heat in their homes and they're cold. Ask 'em when their engines stop. Ask 'em when people who have never known hunger start going hungry. You wanna know something? They won't want us to ask 'em. They'll just want us to get it for 'em!"
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