Americans' pride in US history and democracy drops, and fewer are proud to be American, polls find

[Martin Eden]

5. Pride in personal accomplishment is an indulgence

Pride can blind a person to necessary introspection and to just criticism.

Pride in national history of which a person has taken little or no part is, at best, stolen glory. All too often it blinds people to the full history, good and bad, from which important lessons need to be learned and applied to building a better future.

Worst of all, national pride can perpetuate the wrongs of the past by blinding people to the harmful forces still at work, which must be exposed and corrected.

National pride will be the central theme this July 4th, celebrating the 250th anniversary of our nation's founding. For this occasion to be more than self indulgent pride, and to truly honor our Declaration of Independence and Constitution that followed, should we not reflect upon the highest ideals in those founding documents and assess whether We The People through our own government are upholding those ideals?

We must not turn a blind eye to the wrongs currently being done, nor shirk our responsibility as citizens to expose what is harmful and to make the necessary corrections in order to build a more perfect union and a better future.

Those responsibilities are for every day, not just for annual or fifty year occasions. Today, more than ever in our lifetimes, corrections are urgently needed. The head of our government is the kind of tyrant about which our nation's founders warned us. Our Constitution and institutions thereof are under assault from within, and the majority party in Congress has been complicit. Do we turn a blind eye as we celebrate, or do something about it?