Can we teach kids to love home without making it a statist religion?

By David McElroy · September 12, 2011

When I was growing up, I was a very patriotic little kid. I had a U.S. flag hanging in my room and I read U.S. history and surrounded myself with information about why the United States was great. I was the poster child for the patriotic little kid that many people want their own kids to be.

At this point in my life, I’m disturbed by what I grew up learning and with what I became. It leaves me wondering how we can teach children to be mindful of their communities and appreciative for where they were born, but without turning them into the mindless acolytes of state religion that results from patriotism in most cases.

For many people, patriotism has become nothing more than worship of the government that rules the land they were born in. It’s a kind of statist religion that demands slavish devotion to a government whether it’s right or wrong. I certainly don’t want to teach the future children I hope to have to hate the land in which they were born, but I don’t want them blindly obeying a government, either. How can we strike a balance?

I have three ideas that I think might create better outcomes. See if you think these would help strike a middle ground.

First, teach your children that the government and their country aren’t the same thing. Teach them that it’s a good thing to love the people around them and the land they feel connected to, but that it doesn’t have to come with automatic acceptance of the actions of any levels of government here. For most people today, it’s hard to separate those two things.

Second, don’t teach them to worship political heroes from history. The people who founded this country weren’t saints or heroes. (And many of the presidents who have been made into modern-day political saints — such as Abraham Lincoln and even Franklin Roosevelt — were anything but that.) Children need to be taught the truth about the men (and the occasional woman) who shaped the early days of the country. It will serve them well to understand not to worship men and women as their leaders, because it will save them from disappointment when the truth hits them one day.

Third, teach them a balanced view of how their country got to where it is today. When I was growing up, I read a lot of history, but I now understand that much of what I read was very selective in the truth it told. I know that ugly parts of the past were glossed over and that completely made-up things were passed along as truth. I recommend you give them work by libertarian historians such as Tom Woods and Thomas DiLorenzo. Then when they’re mature enough, give them a copy of Thaddeus Russell’s “A Renegade History of the United States.” They’ll learn things their friends never do in government schools. So teach your children that the early Americans slaughtered the Native Americans and considered blacks to be sub-humans who were worthy of slavery. Teach them that the United States fought an aggressive war with Mexico to capture much of the Southwest. You don’t have to teach them to have guilt over these things — because those of us today aren’t responsible for what those people did — but they need to understand the good and the bad about how the country became what it is today.

There’s a lot that’s right with this country, both presently and historically. It’s a good thing to celebrate the genius and enterprise of people who invented things and built great new industries. In those respects, many of those people should be admired and respected. They can even be role models for our kids — symbols of what they can achieve if they’re willing to use their brains and work hard. But in the areas of U.S. history (or whatever history is local where you are), tell the truth about the bad, too. Let your kids understand that people tend to be very flawed — and that they do both good and bad.

I’m very uncomfortable with what patriotism has become today, because it ignores these points. It teaches Americans to think of their history as mostly spotless and wonderful and that wise men have led the country. But the victors write the mainstream textbooks. Don’t use those. Learn the truth yourself — and make sure your kids know truths that were hidden from us when we were growing up.

I think it will lead them to have much healthier attitudes toward their country — and when they say that they love America, you’ll know they’re loving the parts worth loving, not automatically supporting a government intent on coercing them.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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