Ride 'Em, Cowboy!

Ride 'Em, Cowboy!

Originally shared by Rick Wayne (Author)

Three And A Half Stars

It's a holiday weekend here in the U.S. We get a lot of bad press around the world -- not without reason.

I often tell people I'm proud to be an American, although that wasn't always so. For most of my life, it's been cool to hate on the stars and stripes. When I was younger, mostly until college, I would often keep my mouth shut.

Before university, most of the history you learn is about your own country. Not ALL of course, but that's certainly the focus in most places, since the ultimate goal of compulsory education is not to turn out educated citizens but simply citizens.

But world history was a big part of my higher curriculum -- although my primary training is biological science -- and so for the first time in my life I got to learn about all those other countries out there.

Ouch.

Here's the deal. The Declaration of Independence is an amazing document, unprecedented in its ambition. Literally. To the British who received it, it would have no doubt seemed a farce. And indeed, there were a great many people predicting doom after the Revolution, and again when the Articles of Confederation failed, and again during the War of 1812, and again during the Civil War, and again during waves of immigration, and again at universal suffrage, and again during the Civil Rights movement... And still.

Apparently we've been teetering from the start!

From the moment the Declaration -- and its companion, the Bill of Rights -- were penned, the United States was immediately and embarrassingly short of its ambition. And for the last two hundred and some years, we've still not managed to achieve it. Recent events come to mind.

But that's the thing about lofty goals. They push us to do better. And those two hundred years are nothing if not the story of us -- painfully, often excruciatingly slowly -- doing better.

We still have a long way to go. But I submit to you that it will take far, far longer to get there while liberally-minded people continue to let conservatives appropriate the public symbology, like the flag. And patriotism.

As Orwell noted, there is a difference between that and jingoism. The ideologue will not be able to discern it, their eyes being blinded by the light of their own righteous truth, but in that narrow gap the real battle is fought -- at the level of belief, at the level of myth.

There are always those people who will tell you that the movie you liked was the the most awful, tepid, useless, boring piece of trash ever filmed. Some people wear hyperbole like a hat.

Others will tell you it's the greatest masterpiece since Citizen Kane.

It really depends on what your expectations are. If you once believed the propaganda (that cherry-picked truth) but don't anymore, you'll be an eternally disappointed liberal. If you STILL believe the propaganda, you're part of the problem.

But in between, I believe there's room for us to be proud of what we've accomplished without diminishing the scope of the work ahead. The United States is, if anything, an unfinished work whose first chapter opens with the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

Let's finish the book.

"Fourth" by Franco Brambilla