Who do we think we are?

Being born in the center of the US of A to a very traditional, cliche of a family for that time period, I always had certain beliefs about who I was and who we--me and all the rest of the Americans in the USA were.  We all loved our country when I was little, and no one here didn't.  My perception was less than 3 foot from the ground back then, and strongly colored by parents that grew up in the Great Depression and were military during WWII, and all their friends were also depression kids that went to war to save the world.

Back when I was short--really short--a regular "shorty" if you listen to some music--I knew with the power of the mind of a child that I was lucky to be an American.  I knew I lived in "the land of the free and the home of the brave".  I knew that soldiers were heroes.  I  knew that the POTUS was the smartest, kindest, most perfect leader of the world and that is why we voted for him.  I knew that we were all equal, all of us, every last one of us, that the law was fair, that justice was blind and was handed out in equal and fair amounts to each of us--just like Halloween candy when I went trick-or-treating.

My view was not a world view.  I was in a segregated school.  Everyone in the school went to a protestant church--the catholic children's families could afford the church school at least for a few years.  We had a few "Indian" children, but in my state, everyone had a Cherokee princess as a great-grandmother.  There were a couple of kids that had mothers from Asia, and they looked a lot like the "Indian" kids.  Everyone acted the same------like a kid"  Not that there wasn't variation among kids;  those that had lived there all their lives, that had parents, grandparents and even great-grandparents in the area, they were a little cliquish, and everyone knew who was really poor and who only had one parent.  Poor kids were rather avoided--mostly due to the smell, it was the early '60's and except for 2-3 families, everyone was rather low on the economic totem pole therefore who we saw as poor frequently meant lacking indoor plumbing.  Reality is, the really well off family was a lawyer, big, big house and exotic animal heads on the wall of the study.  My family was in the middle, the bottom edge of the middle, but the middle was big.  The kids didn't really talk about the kids with one parent;  if it came up, it was due to the rarity, and eventually (go to school with the same 60 kids for 12 years) we knew, but it was more likely our parents were gossiping about that than us.  Parents were ubiquitous to us little people.

By third grade we knew all those patriotic songs that schools used to sing, "My country tis of thee" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Country,_%27Tis_of_Thee#Lyrics , "America, the Beautiful" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_the_Beautiful ,  "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" , "This Land is Our Land", "God Bless America", "The Marine's Hymn", "The Star-spangled Banner", "Yankee Doodle Dandee", "You're a Grand ole' Flag".  That usually got us through a couple of music classes per week.
We all knew the words.  The words were poetic, grand, idealistic and made old soldiers cry.  Except for the national anthem, no one ever had us look at the lyrics or why the song was written.  Woody Guthrie would not have been impressed with how his song was used.

We also were raised on black and white war movies and news talk about a nuclear war---and we were all scared of "RED China" and Russia. We all knew that the USA was the good guys, the white hats, the best country in the world.    I was in College before I realized that the only country that had ever used a nuclear weapon was my beautiful American States.   That is also when I learned that Women were not necessarily included in that bill of rights and we had not approved the Women's Equal Rights Amendment.   The varnish was cracking and the truth was coming out.

We still raise our children to believe those songs, although the teachers that are doing the teaching may not be as enmeshed in it as they once were.  Most people still say things like  "America, love it or leave it"  "We are still better than every other country in the world so quit your whining",  "If you can't succeed in America, you can't succeed anywhere".  We are USAcentric.  We don't know about other countries except in relationship to wars in which we either fought against them or allied with them.  If you ask most children where a city is or where the person that invented something was from, they will guess America.
(read this for a nice side trip --
http://markmanson.net/america   )

We did not invent everything.  Many of the things we take for granted were invented long before Columbus arrived here--here being the Caribbean and not Plymouth Rock.  We did not discover everything, many of those basic Scientific discoveries were made centuries before the USA began, We are one nation, big, but not the biggest--we are number 3 in population, with both China (#1) and India (#2) being about 4 times bigger than us.  Geographically, we are also third, with Russia in the first place and China in the 4th place.  (Antartica, which is basically an unoccupied Continent in the second place for Size--who new Antartica was bigger than the USA?)  We are not the oldest, some will claim we are the oldest democracy, but we are not a democracy, and ancient Greece was also a Republic.

Maybe, the USA is really great at raising Cheerleaders.  We have an amazing PR department for our own citizens.  We have class for every citizen on patriotism.   Or maybe we are just drinking our own snake oil.

The media--corporate version, social media, questionable media like FOX where everyone knows what they are doing and if they only watch FOX they have no perceptual difficulties, has been telling us who we are since I was a child.  Public Schools, with their curriculum chosen by the politicians, has been telling us who we are via approved books on history, social studies, civics and government for as long as public school has existed.    Everyone born in this country has been told who we are.

So, before anyone tells me to leave if I don't like it--wait.  I don't like it.  I love it.  I love what I was told it was.  I love the ideal of it.  I love the myth that is my country's history.

I just want to make the reality match the original promise.  We can be who we thought we were.