Walter Rodgers: The Right Wing's Perversion of Patriotism
[Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.
correspondent.]
It once was a given that you did not discuss religion or politics in polite company. To this list, I would add “patriotism.” It has become the new secular American religion, so mercurial that we cannot even agree about what it is....
It was not always thus. As a boy in New England, just after World War II, I was schooled in patriotism quite unlike what’s out there today. The week before Thanksgiving, public schools taught us the Pilgrims’ vision of religious liberty. On Memorial Day, Cub Scouts marched up to Pine Hill Cemetery and laid flowers on the graves of Civil War veterans, who we learned had fought and died to preserve the Union....
Massachusetts was and is arguably the most liberal state in the Union and yet it drilled patriotism into its schoolchildren for generations....
The Israelis get it right. They have universal military service for men and women that provides social cohesion in an otherwise fractious Jewish society. The Israeli army is the great melting pot, the great social leveler, blurring the line between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews....
Read entire article at CS Monitor
correspondent.]
It once was a given that you did not discuss religion or politics in polite company. To this list, I would add “patriotism.” It has become the new secular American religion, so mercurial that we cannot even agree about what it is....
It was not always thus. As a boy in New England, just after World War II, I was schooled in patriotism quite unlike what’s out there today. The week before Thanksgiving, public schools taught us the Pilgrims’ vision of religious liberty. On Memorial Day, Cub Scouts marched up to Pine Hill Cemetery and laid flowers on the graves of Civil War veterans, who we learned had fought and died to preserve the Union....
Massachusetts was and is arguably the most liberal state in the Union and yet it drilled patriotism into its schoolchildren for generations....
The Israelis get it right. They have universal military service for men and women that provides social cohesion in an otherwise fractious Jewish society. The Israeli army is the great melting pot, the great social leveler, blurring the line between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews....