Stumble It!
Sep 10 2008
How do you define pride?
How do you define yourself most often? Are you, a nationality, a political party, an ethnicity? Do you take pride in being so? People in the United States for example will often say they are proud to be American, but when broken down in simplest terms, the idea of being American becomes more and more abstract. One’s definition might vary greatly from one person to the next. If pride comes from living in America and achieving goals and having the freedom to do so, that’s fine. But pride is usually reserved for accomplishments… awards or good deeds. Oscar wins are achieved and good deeds are performed. But the examples above are neither achieved nor performed…. They just are.
At their most basic levels nationality, race, religion and the like are what sociologists call “social constructs.” We humans make them up. For instance, there are no dividing lines between countries on the earth’s surface. This was lost on one little child I know of who innocently and naively asked how God made the lines dividing the countries. Also, race and ethnicity are equally not accomplished, but in-born. When people have ethnic pride, what are they really saying? Are they proud of the uncontrollable fact they were born a certain way? It is possible but not very likely. It would be like a person being proud of his right hand just because it was there. Proud is an inappropriate term here. Appreciative is much more accurate. A person can appreciate ideas, cultures, nationalities etcetera in both noun and and verb form in that a vote (noun) can be appreciated the same as a person’s having to the ability to vote (verb).
Whatever your reason for your pride, make sure that you earned that special feeling or stop using pride as any kind of synonym for appreciation, happiness or respect. Unless your earn citizenship or membership of course, in which case I tip my hat to you, Good Citizen!
Wax proudly!
Generally, I define pride by the amount of “Support Our Troops”, or, more appropriately, “God Bless Our Troops” bumper stickers, or American Flag bumper stickers on someone’s SUV. Much in the same way that I define “patriot” to mean “Evangelical Republican”. I know I’m not alone in this view, back me up, GOP!!
Great post, by the way.
CNN, MSNBC and Fox News all have the same problems, just with different degrees of denial/brainwashing of viewers.
I actually don’t hate Bill O’Reilly too much, he has some godawful beliefs but he does sometimes have an open mind. I think he just really does not want McCain and believes that Obama, despite how much O’Reilly hates his economic policy, would make America a better place than McCain would.
I could say far too much about this post, as I have a sociology degree. Religion is anything that somebody identifies with and uses to explain the world around them, and I think that race, nationality, etc are all just forms of religion. People that are invariably proud of America are that way because it allows them to cope with negative aspects of America while making them feel a part of something great ( without them even having to take any kind of positive actions) - its sort of like how only want to see the world from a liberal and open minded standpoint and believe that helping people is the only real satisfaction you can get. Everybody needs a way to cope with the world, there are just extremely different variations.