User:GumpTheGamer

Are you a patriot?

Yes, still a patriot, not as strongly as I used to be. Patriotism is love of country. But country is a variable. The ideas in the Constitution are pretty constant. But the culture and volk is shifting. And in my little six decades of being here, it has shifted quite a lot. When I was 18 the country was one way, and my love for it was unqualified and fervent. Now the country is another way, and my love for it is a bit more reserved, and maybe a little paler. I feel that the country has left me, I have not left the country that I loved so well. We've become a place with open borders, which was a big shock to me. We've become dysfunctional and untrustworthy -- two more big shocks. We've become petty, mercenary, and chisling -- more shocks to my tender loving spirit of patriotism. I grew up in the 1940's and 1950's when America was really "The Shining City on the Hill" a place that was admired all over the world, and for good reason. Our intellectuals were original, creative, profound, and productive. Our working people were amazingly skillful and fully competitive with all working persons everywhere. Our universities were cathedrals of learning and wisdom and guidance. Our religion was moderate and kept out of the political arena by traditions of respect and separation of church and state. Our sexual practices were healthier, less twisted, less un-natural than today. There were no Marxists in the Oval Office, or anywhere near it. Banks were solvent, and basically pretty straight-up in the ways they did business. Teaching was a true profession based on talent, inborn, natural raw talent -- those are the people who became teachers -- and they decided what was going to go on in their classrooms. Race-card activism and ethnic identity fixation was not the primary subject matter taught in our universities. Students studied math, and science, and business, not whining, and mao-maoing, and demonstrating. America was inventive -- tons of wondrous new products and ideas just poured out of small labs and garages all over America -- we were the engineers of the world -- the creators of wealth, the fountainhead of originality and imagination -- that was the 1940's and the 1950's, when I loved USA with no reservations, with my whole heart -- just all in. I am hurt by history as it has gone down. So, still a patriot, still hanging in there, but a shadow of my former feelings, a pale version, a more tentative version. I did not leave America. America left me. And now where shall I go? Where is my habitat? I feel like a tired polar bear on a small and ever smaller ice floe, surrounded by hungry sharks. Short Answer: Poor me. I would teach you the song if you were here, you would laugh. I do sing it in my kitchen about once a month, and dance around. The neighbors think it's funny -- but it's really me being the sad clown from Pagliacci. Truth is truth. My commitment is just to tell it like it is. That flag flies at the top of my mast.