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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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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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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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