I understand what you're saying, but there are plenty of people who love America precisely because, after being born into poverty, they were able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work hard and become very successful. They appreciate that the opportunity for such success was there.
Since you bring up Jim Crow and the like, all I can say is that while they're comparatively rare, there are many Americans of color who haven't found those things to be barriers to their enthusiasm for America.
Well like I said, I think we should acknowledge the mistakes of the past but also recognize all the positives as well. All too often I feel like we dwell on the negative aspects of our past WAY TOO MUCH in this country.
That would be great, but it is indeed pie in the sky I think.
I believe that the world is competitive by nature and nothing will ever change this. It's built into the very fabric of existence.
As human beings we are always competing against each other in one way or another, and nations will always be doing the same thing. Someone will always be on top. And under those circumstances, I want it to be the USA.
That doesn't mean life has to be shitty elsewhere. It just means that in the grand global hierarchy, I want us to be #1. Because if it's not us, it will be someone else.
I hear you on the latter part, but I feel that if we're going to dream of the world we want, we should never settle for the constraints of what's realistic in the current paradigm. I have children who obviously live here in America and so I certainly wouldn't want them to ever arbitrarily suffer so some other place can reap the whirlwind. What I do believe, in fact what I know, is that there is so much excess in the G22. Incredible amounts. There is enough, right now, for this top dog mentality to die, but we just don't want it enough. This isn't universal. There are definitely some resources that are sufficiently scarce (e.g. potable water, oil, gold, copper) that there will be political struggle to determine who gets priority, but there are plenty of other things that are less scarce and that we simply hoard because of our exceptionalism, even though our government does have commendable aid programs as a strange sort of counterweight.
To me, what happened in this country with my ancestors is the same struggle that is happening in Zimbabwe, Uganda, Venezuela, the Phillipines, Palestine, Catalonia, with women in Saudi Arabia, with LGBT people in Russia, in the territories held by ISIS and with dissidents in China: the powerful flexing their might over the less fortunate to deny them their basic humanity and access to what they need to survive. I can't look away from that just for the sake of saying I live in a great country. But that said, I do believe in local efforts, at the city, county and sometimes even state level being the laboratories where we can push ourselves closer to an ideal. The nation seems too clumsy and oafish an artifact of the imperial era to really accomplish much.
The other day I learned a term, "apatheistic," which apparently refers to people for whom the existence of deities is simply irrelevant as it a) doesn't affect their day to day lives and b) even if there was some abstract entity, because of A, it wouldn't require our worship, love or attention. It's a touch beyond agnosticism and some philosophers believe it is the best description of the vast majority of people's opinions in every society since religion was a thing. My feelings on the state are similar. It doesn't require my reverence or worship. At best, it requires my constant challenge and critique, which in a roundabout way sort of brings us back to Mr. Jones, who this thread was originally about. His whole career is built on critique and suspicion of the state and he's good at it, but he wastes his platform on easily disprovable nonsense a lot of the time and on inciting anger against an imagined "other" the rest of the time. In that sense, he doesn't contribute much to the national (or international) public sphere and he's certainly not on the ground organizing communities to become more livable, peaceful, or just. He claims to do what he does under the auspices of love of country and I would contend that embedded within the ideology of patriotism there is always the potential for people like him who attempt to subvert the ideals of free thought. Just like how embedded in the ideology of communism, there's always room for totalitarianism. Marx left some poisoned pills in many of his writings and they've unfortunately been interpreted to the worst ends as we've seen in Russia, Cuba, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere. Unsurprisingly the first innovation Lenin made to Marxism was to make nationalism a cornerstone of the party whereas Marx himself envisioned it as an ideology beyond the bounds of the nation-state. I say all this to say that nationalism mixed with anything seems to be the road to ruin, even though it's a necessary precondition of modernity. It always requires a reimagining of history and a turning inward that makes the outside look more alien.
But even as I criticize it, I'm a little terrified of what will come after the era of nation-states. So maybe there's merit in what you're saying and the nation needs a little injection of patriotism to keep staggering along because who can say what will come after? The way capital is moving, the answer seems to be "networks," and all that portends. It seems like we could be heading for something much worse than the state ever was so maybe a laudable goal at least would be to have functioning, transparent, accountable states that we can be proud of, but not that we love.
