@neologist,
I'm not sure if it's a type of religion, but I did wonder about this:
Does the type of patriotism promoted by Americans (particularly the extreme Right) still have a place in the modern world that should be evolving?
Now, before everyone gets lost in their rage about this, let me say that I’m not saying I’m against patriotism or that I see myself as anything other than patriotic. I do wonder, if that’s something that I should strive to change, however, because the world should be evolving toward a Unified Global Nation. Instead, patriotism is fighting a battle against that. It promotes individual countries instead of making people think on a Global Scale. All of the Dystopian Societies in Science Fiction seem like a much more real outcome than the promise of the United Federation of Planets. So, now back to my original question, does the current type of Patriotism promoted in America have a place in a world that should be moving away from being divided?
I’m not saying that patriotism needs to be done away with, but I do think it needs to be redirected. I think being patriotic about a Unified Global Nation should be what should be taught now. Talking about people as A people, instead of “those people, these people” and that borders should start to dissolve, not be reinforced. There was a time that people aspired to be one with others, and that sentiment has slowly been replaced by fear, anger and misunderstanding. I’m not sure what happened, but we have lost our way, and become so wrapped up in ourselves that we have forgotten to look outward and onward. The future should be our goal, not the past. People talk about how great America is/used (depending on your view) to be, and everyone is convinced that our goal should be to continue to strive for that title. “America needs to be the Greatest Country in the world AGAIN!” Why? Why would people strive for that? Why shouldn’t the goal be to see everyone succeed, and to do everything we can to help promote their growth? “America succeeds, the world succeeds.” Maybe. What happens, if America doesn’t succeed, and the world is dependent upon that? What if we’d prepared the world to stand without us, and had made everyone stronger, so that when we needed help, they could’ve? I’m not saying they would’ve, but the chance is far higher that if our attitude had been more globally inclined, it would’ve promoted a more globally helpful attitude.
Everyone gets upset about jobs being sent overseas to other countries, and “Americans lost jobs” but what made that a bad thing was that the companies did it for profit, not to promote the growth of the countries they exported the jobs to. If the goal had been to develop those countries through making the products there, and providing jobs with a fair wage that uplifted the populace, we would be on a much better road for being unified instead of segregated.
