Cabot Phillips of Campus Reform interviewed students at New York University to test the truth of a Gallup Poll showing a sharp decline in young Americans who are proud of their country. Sadly, the responses he received aren’t surprising.
Student after student made it clear: they were not.
“No! I’m not proud of America. I’m not proud of what we’ve done,” said one student, while another simply declared, “definitely not.”
One student, addressing the concept of American Exceptionalism, said “I think we need to stop thinking we’re the best nation on Earth. It’s just egotistical and not accurate.” When asked which country is better than America, she responded, “probably some nice little socialist country in Europe.”
One student went so far as to say that “patriotic views about America” are nothing more than “a tool to be used to get people to join the Army.”
Here’s the full video.
While interviews on other college campuses might show a different attitude, the poll by Gallup is significant. Too many young people don’t like being Americans. This shouldn’t come as a shock given rampant lazy parenting and the state of our education system with its anti-American curriculum that attacks founding principles, free markets, and citizenship — if these are taught at all.
We have a generation of entitled people who think life happens to them, instead of them making life happen. They act as if they’re passive observers in a world where everything is out of their control except when they’re protesting in the streets, on college campuses, or at restaurants serving “undesirables” from the Trump administration. They see themselves as victims of the economy, the justice system, the climate, the arc of history, even their own biology.
When you join entitlement and victimhood in one person, or as I prefer to put it, pride and envy, you have someone ruled by anger and bitterness, seeking to make others pay for what he thinks he should have.
No wonder they don’t like America, because America has historically been a land that rejects entitlement and victimhood. Instead, it has stood on the principles of hard work and personal responsibility. When young people say they hate America, this is what they really resent, not some vague American “egoism” they can’t even define. Ironically, it’s their ego that’s the problem.
They hate America because they are so filled with pride in themselves, fueled by delusion, resentment, and entitlement, that they have no room for healthy pride in something else. Focused only on themselves and ruled by a miserable ideology, they can’t be proud of a principled nation built by men and women who understood hard work and responsibility and created a country in which young people have the freedom to say every stupid thing that comes into their head.
Hardened by their own discontent, these perpetual complainers have no love for those who fought and died so every man and woman can be in control of their own lives, take responsibility for their own successes and failures, and revel in the strange mix of anxiety and joy that comes from living a life of freedom.
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