As I was driving home from school the other day, the deejay on the radio commented on a high school student who recently refused to say the pledge of allegiance. She opened the phone lines, and many adults called in to say what this student should be forced to do to give him a better appreciation for his country. One suggestion—one that appealed to me personally—was to make the student “volunteer” at a VA hospital for a week. Good idea, I thought. Let him see the sacrifices people have made for him to live the way he does.
The previous night, I had sat through a similar display of ignorant conceit. During a discussion on American values in my college sociology class, one student stated, “This country is so corrupt,” and continued to rant in broad—and mostly false—generalizations about the US. This sparked an avid debate where, overwhelmingly, those opposing the US were around 18-21 with little worldly knowledge and only book-taught education while those defending our country were either over forty and/or had some type of military experience. It was so easy for these students to complain about a system they had never been taught to appreciate without realizing how much their country had done for them.
The ultimate irony of both situations is that all of these students who were so quick to speak out against the US and its inadequacies had and were receiving predominantly public education throughout their lives and even sat in government-funded classrooms as they denounced the government who had provided it.
The more I thought about the arrogance of these students, I was reminded of a scene from the movie “The American President.” In a press meeting, the president says, “You want to claim this country as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.” This is the fundamental idea behind the first amendment. Because many fought, labored, sacrificed, and died for our nation, we are able to say that we hate our nation as freely as we love it. Our government is one of the greatest in the world because we are guaranteed this freedom, as well as many others.
The question then stands: why does today’s youth so disdainfully denounce the country and government that provided the way for them to have such rights, not to mention one of the highest qualities of life in the entire world? To this, I found several possible answers.
First, the so-called “Generation X” and those younger than them have never seen war first-hand. They don’t understand the suffering and sacrifice that so many have paid for the price of democracy and freedom. History classes portray war as a list of supposedly “important” people, places, and pacts, and leave only hollow statistics of casualties that mean nothing to the average student, save another number to remember at test time. Have we belittled war so much that the lives which paid for our freedom have been reduced to simple number factoids? We are only free today because of that given by so many before us. Each day, the liberties available to us would not be there if they hadn’t been bought.
Another reason seemed to arise from worldly experience. For those who have never lived anywhere else, they cannot understand what it is to live under a different government with oppression, famine, or epidemics of fatal diseases. Often, there are vaccines to those diseases. In other countries, people still die at alarming rates from influenza, smallpox, and the measles. In this country, it is mandated that babies be immunized for these and many others, and health care is available to those in need. Some countries still live under extreme political oppression where speaking against the government could get them imprisoned or killed. Here, we burn the flag and refuse to pledge allegiance without fear of any type of punishment. We, that is, the American people, don’t notice these positive things the government provides because we’re too busy complaining about the negative. We’ve become so used to the ideas of democracy, freedom, and liberty that it’s gotten increasingly easy to take them for granted. Our reality—our understanding of the world—is determined by the environment in which we live. Too many people believe that what we have is how most of the world lives when, in fact, Americans make up only 4.50 percent of the world’s population yet “consume 5 times the world’s average per capita use of energy, 3 times the amount of steel, and more than 2 times the amount of grain” (www.zpg.org). Those figures mean much of the earth’s population lives on a very limited amount of those resources. Our reality, our lavish wastefulness and luxury , is not the norm; it’s the exception. As you started your day this morning, did you find it a privilege to have running water and a toilet? Did you have to worry that you might not have food today? Did you think twice about speaking freely on an issue, or were you scared of seizure and torture for voicing your opinions? The reality is that most of the world does not have the privileges that we do just by being born in this country. If you want to find patriotism in this country, you have to find someone who has experienced that reality—an immigrant or a veteran—someone who has seen devastation, starvation, or political oppression up close. When it becomes real, it’s much easier to see our American citizenship as a gift for which we should be truly grateful.
So, the solution to the complacency in America’s youth is not to try to punish them for exercising their personal freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution, for that would defeat the purpose for which it was written. Instead, we need to show them America in a positive and realistic light. We need to show them the difference between what they have and what they could have somewhere else. We need to turn the history into something real to them, not just something to memorize. The speech from “The American President” continues, “Now show me that. Defend that. Celebrate that in your classrooms. Then stand up and sing about the land of the free.” When we learn to celebrate our rights and teach our children to appreciate them, only then will we develop the patriotism our government thrives on. Only then will we generate the support the military needs to succeed. When we can teach our children to respect and understand their country, its government, and its past, they will not hesitate to stand and say, “I pledge allegiance…”
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