Overall, 39% of U.S. adults say they are “extremely proud” to be American in the most recent poll.
Meanwhile, only 18% of those aged 18-34 said the same, compared to 40% of those aged 35-54 and 50% of those 55 and over.
18% is still too high. As Obama’s pastor said, God damn America! Americans have very little to be proud of at this point.
The kids under 35 have only known post-911 snooping, bigotry, military adventurism, the 2008 mortgage crash, housing and education costing multiples of what previous generations paid (in adjusted dollars), COVID insanity, a political system that is completely inaccessible to them and utterly uncaring about their needs, and, finally, a climate being actively accelerated to disaster.
The wonder here shouldn’t be at their lack of patriotism. It should be at the fact that they aren’t setting fire to everything, murdering politicians, billionaires, and their lackeys, and generally grinding everything to a halt.
I’m embarrassed to be American at this point… Republicans are literal fucking nazis, democrats continue catering to the whims of corporate lobbyist bribes, and corruption is everywhere. Nothing will change until the boomers start dying off ~2032, and that’s assuming we can remain a democracy that long.
I hate this. Actively wishing death on people because of the old “boomers bad” meme. You can’t really pin all of societies faults on boomers when there’s so many complex issues at play and so much propaganda machines. Are you hoping for the random 70 year old fella to die so your party wins? You have more reason to hate a executive from the same generation as you than some random boomer. The machinations that brainwash people into voting right wing will just make the next generation vote right wing as well. Letting capitalism divide people is how it wins.
Yep, and they’d do well to remember that the boomers were the ones who fought tooth and nail against Vietnam, the military industrial complex, and a very long struggle to get Roe v. Wade into law. Oh, and interracial marriage, Stonewall, women’s rights, workplace equality, and . . . the list goes on.
Much of what is being actively destroyed today is what boomers fought so hard to achieve in the 60s and 70s when average Americans still had a voice that was not corrupted by selfishness, greed, and foreign-based divisive propaganda. And they too paid the price: no one here seems to remember Kent State, or the sit-ins, or the Vietnam draft, or the many riots, or even the “Dick Nixon before Nixon dicks you” campaign buttons, lol.
While there are certainly many hard-right Fox-watching boomers that are every inch “I got mine so fuck you” there are many more as pissed off as the younguns because what they fought for so hard themselves has now been skewered by the same corporate/religious right interests they fought against.
A good example is abortion rights. Just because they are now too old to breed (or to have their bodies forced into carrying pregnancies against their will) does not mean that they don’t remember how it was BEFORE Roe v. Wade. Hell, even I remember those black and white gory pics of death by illegal abortion, and I was only a kid then.
There are good and bad in every generation, just as there is good and bad in every person. “Otherizing” entire groups based on their date of birth is just as ignorant as doing so based on their genitals or their bedfellows or their religion or their skin color.
What is there to be proud of?
Abolishing slavery, ending Jim Crow, giving women the vote, becoming one of the first dozen countries on the planet to legalize gay marriage, helping win WW2, helping support Ukraine, donating more to foreign aid than any other country on the planet, the Marshall Plan, everything about NASA, best national parks on the planet, entertainment capital of the world, first country to land a man on the moon, the whole “nation of immigrants” things making us one of the most diverse countries on the planet.
And of course, none of that excuses the dark parts of our history, the slavery, genocide, imperialism in Latin America, among many, many others. But that brings me to the thing I love most about American: with the exception of the loud Republican minority, we’re a country that actually reckons with the dark parts of our past and tries to make up for them instead of sweeping them under the rug. And then we get to work fixing them.
We’ve made so much progress even in my relatively brief lifetime-- in agonizing two-steps-forward, one-step-back fashion, for sure, but that doesn’t make it not count. I’m so excited to see where we go in the future.
A lot of that is just a list of problems America had that were solved by people fighting against the American government lol
Yes, which is the single biggest reason I’m proud to be American: because our people’s willingness to stand up for one another and keep fighting for a better tomorrow, even against the most powerful opponents, even at risk to their own lives.
This strongly implies this is something special about American people that isn’t shared by the rest of humanity.
Be proud to be human because our heritage is international. Splitting us up into national identities is ridiculous and only holding us back.
I can be proud to be American and a human at the same time. Saying “I love my family” doesn’t mean I don’t love other people too, and it doesn’t mean I think my family is somehow better than other human beings, it just means I love my family. Same logic applies here.
And what of the many atrocities committed by America?
And what of the many atrocities committed by humanity?
