No Country Can Stand for Long When So Many of Its Own Citizens Hate It

Never in my life have I seen a time when so many people hate America.

The fact that the people I’m talking about are Americans is downright astonishing.   As has been pointed out in social media, many haters of America (including the Hollywood elite) constantly threaten to leave America but few actually do it. So America is still the best, but they still hate it. This is mind-boggling.

What can we make of America-hating in the age of Black Lives matter?

Temple rally. Photo by Lynn Woolley for WBDaily.  This is what you get when citizens hate their country.

First, we can say that it’s been 244 years since 1776 and it’s a miracle the Great Experiment has lasted as long as it has. Look around the world.

No one talks about making Europe great again. Russia is in decline. China is ascending, but is a repressive totalitarian state lacking basic freedoms. The Middle East is a hellhole for women and gays. North Korea is an ungodly disaster as is Venezuela.

Free nations like Canada and Australia are just fine, but no one looks to them to be a global stabilizing force.

On the other hand, the United States of America is exceptional.

We are history’s premier representative constitutional democracy. We saved the day in World War I and World War II. Because of our righteous power, many wars have been fought and won, and because of our deterrent, many have been avoided. The nations of NATO expect us to come running when a Xi or a Putin, or some ayatollah threatens them.

Why then do so many people hate us? Even our own citizens?

The question bears pondering.

Maybe two decades ago I was walking with some business associates in one of our big cities, either Los Angeles or Chicago. (It’s been a while.) There was a street beggar in a wheelchair, a black man, asking for handouts. I rarely accommodate such people because I’d rather they get a job and earn a living with dignity. I may have said something to him; I can’t remember. I just remember him getting out of that wheelchair and threatening to come after me.

I thought at the time about how we don’t see this much in small towns, but this guy was one of thousands like him in the streets of our major metro downtowns. Since then, the situation of the homeless, needy, panhandlers, or whatever you want to call them has reached epidemic proportions.

This is what you get when people hate their own country. SoHo New York photo 6-2-20 by Julie Sullivan for WBDaily.

They say in San Francisco, the downtown streets are littered with used syringes and people urinate in public. The people that do this are criminals, the down-and-out, addicts, mentally ill, or whatever – but this isn’t what America ought to be.

I have believed for some time that there is an underbelly in America comprised of people who (for whatever reason) do not participate in being part of this country’s promise.

The emergence of Antifa and Black Lives Matter has shown us how many people we’ve been living alongside for years actually hate this country. How long they’ve hated it is unknown, but I’ll bet that guy that got up out of that wheelchair blamed America for his problems.

As Andy Kim once sang: Baby, how’d we ever get this way?

I don’t know but I have a theory. I think we can lay most of the blame at the feet of our education establishment and the eggheads that run it.

Going back to the sixties before we had the two-letter postal abbreviations for states, like TX for Texas and so on, I had a teacher who railed against abbreviating the word “Texas” at all. She said that Texas is a great state and we dishonor it by using “Tex.” instead of the complete spelling. I can’t remember her name, but what she said stuck with me. I don’t use “Xmas” in place of “Christmas” for the same reason.

In those days at Travis Junior High in Temple, Texas (full spelling), there was no doubt in any teacher’s mind that the United States was the greatest county on Earth and that Texas was the greatest state. Today, when we talk about “pride,” we typically mean taking satisfaction from sexual perversion. In those days, “pride” was more often about a great accomplishment or an innate knowledge that we lived in the best nation on Earth.

Rise of the eggheads.

Unfortunately, as the nuclear-freeze children of the sixties grew up and entered into education and journalism, our pride in our country began to be questioned. After all, we had been a country that embraced and allowed slavery and Jim Crow.

This is true, and these things should be taught. Slavery, however, ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement correctly showed the corruption of inequality under the law. We began to make corrections such as Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action. Universities that once refused to admit blacks soon began using race as a qualifier for admittance.

In some ways it became an advantage to be a minority. Companies began looking for qualified minorities to hire and to put on their boards of directors. Professional sports, having integrated years ago, has created a class of multi-millionaires that can go back to their old communities and spread the wealth through any means they want.

The language of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence allowed all this to happen. You simply can’t say…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

…and then expect black Americans not to share in that freedom. These words, and others in our Founding Documents laid the foundation for equality under the law. Now, more than 150 years after slavery, and following decades of remedial laws to make up for Jim Crow, America is pretty much where it ought to be vis-a-viv human rights. In fact, the pendulum has swung quite far to the other side.

Virtually every college has a Department of Diversity and Inclusion, run by a highly paid grievance officer. All big companies have diversity departments as well. Colleges will roll over backward to enroll any minority (except Asians) with decent grades and a desire to succeed.

So why not just declare victory, proclaim that minorities have achieved virtually everything they’ve ever asked for, and move on?

Academia and the cult of education will not let go. Neither will Hollywood. Our young people are now taught that America is a nasty country that was built on the backs of African-American slaves and is still loaded with “systemic racism.”

That charge, of course, would mean that we have laws in our legal system that are intended to hold blacks and other minorities back, but the opposite is true. Black people are now showered with opportunities. This new decade we are entering should be a golden age for black people, but they are too-often taught to hate their country.

Academic eggheads found acceptance in the Democratic Party years ago when the Republicans were considered the party of the rich. Now running our schools, they cannot get over the fact that practically all the legislative goals that should lead to equality have been met.

Now it is up to minorities to succeed on their own. But it’s easier to take the bait from a professor that all personal shortcomings relate back to slavery. Somehow, we have to shake this mindset, but please tell me which Director of Diversity and Inclusion will give up a six-figure salary?

This is going on in our local schools as well. 

Austin, Texas May 30, 2020. Photo by Lynn Woolley for WBDaily. This is not loving America.

I live in Temple, Tex. – I should say Texas – a well-manicured city of about 80,000 that has a beloved school superintendent, a good high school football team, and an obcession with race.

The superintendent is Dr. Bobby Ott. I once had lunch with him and he is a decent, well-educated man who knows far more than I do about education. I couldn’t help but like him.

One thing I know is that if you start early in school telling minorities that they are put-upon and all their failures lead back to slavery, and they hear it again and again in college, and see it played out in Hollywood movies – they will believe it.

I think that’s what’s behind the undercurrent of America-hatred that we see now in the Black Lives Matter movement. It never should have happened.

Now that “Social Justice” is all the rage (along with riots, burning of cities, looting, and shooting at police), local schools are pressured to teach more “cultural awareness.” Good Lord! How much of this can we take before our country goes totally to hell? Why are schools doing this? The short answer is that it’s trendy and the cult of education insists that every ISD play along. So Temple is.

It’s called “CAT Chats.” Note that the football team in Temple is the Wildcats, so that works well – but CAT could stand for “Cultural Awareness Training.” I assume it stands for just that.

In a local newspaper column written by Joel Valley, Ott says the TISD should not just be diverse, because that is too passive. It must be “culturally responsive.” So CAT Chats will be a way to “develop relatable strategies with students.”

Huh?

Lisa Adams, Temple ISD assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction said:

“If there are social justice issues and concerns happening with our students, we want to ensure we as a district are responsive to the needs of our learners.”

Silly me.

I thought schools were there to teach math, science, computers, English, grammar, foreign language, history and such. But no. Now our schools are going to teach social justice. This is precisely why we have a boiling hatred of our country that is now being played out in places like Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland, and New York.

The idea of America and Texas being the greatest places on Earth is old and worn out and is no longer taught. Schools now must be diverse, multi-lingual, and centers of social justice. PARENTS: Those of you who can afford it, get your children out of public schools as soon as you can.

Tocqueville was right. And we should heed his warnings.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic “Democracy In America” should be taught in schools in place of “White Fragility” but good luck with that. Wikipedia carries this concise summary of precisely what is happening in America today:

Tocqueville observed that social mechanisms have paradoxes, as in what later became known as the Tocqueville effect: “social frustration increases as social conditions improve.” He wrote that this growing hatred of social privilege, as social conditions improve, leads to the state concentrating more power to itself.

Did you get that?

This French scholar wrote this between 1835 and 1840, telling us that as social conditions improve, frustrations increase with a growing hatred of other people who may be more successful than you are.

Now ask yourself if the Democrats – now considering adding states to get more liberal senators, and packing the Supreme Court, are not doing just what he predicted. They are leading the government into more concentrated power.   If they succeed, tyranny might be just around the corner.

Let’s hope America’s best days are still to come.

This can happen ONLY if our schools make a big turnaround and begin teaching that America is a truly exceptional country. Our schools, unfortunately, are more into the cultish trends of the education establishment.

To paraphrase an old saying:

Teach our children to love America, and they will enjoy the fruits of democracy forever. Teach them that they live in a nation of systemic racism where all their problems are someone else’s fault and they will burn that nation down.

We can’t fix our country until we fix our schools. So far as I can see, not one single politician (other than Donald Trump) is remotely interested in fixing them. Yet, no nation can stand for long when so many of its own people hate it.

Shame on our education system. And on those who do nothing about it.

Lynn Woolley is a Texas-based author, broadcaster, and songwriter. Follow his podcast at https://www.PlanetLogic.us. Check out his author’s page at https://www.Amazon.com/author/lynnwoolley. Order books direct from Lynn at https://PlanetLogicPress.Square.Site. Email Lynn at lwoolley9189@gmail.com.