We Need to Teach Our Children to Love America

I was standing on the sidewalk preparing to walk across the street with Debbie when a young boy about 5 years old came up to me. He looked up at me and reached out his hand. I shook his hand and then, without a word, looked at the mother. She pointed to my hat and said he wanted to thank me for my service.  I shook hands with the young man and floated across the street. Not only was I gratified by his handshake, but knowing his mom was teaching him to love America caused my patriotic heart to tear up.

Peggy Noonan, a respected opinion columnist, and my favorite has penned a thought-provoking article for this Memorial Day weekend. Teach Your Children to Love America demands your attention. Published in The Wall Street Journal on May 25-26, 2024, it is a must-read. I strongly encourage you to seek out this article; its insights are invaluable and timely. Allow me to share some of its key points.

She makes the case that in the past decade and more, our children have been taught that America is a bully and a dark place. She rightly says that:

To kids from difficult circumstances, it means there is no hope; you won’t escape a violent or unhappy family into a better place, the world outside, because it isn’t better. The world outside is America, which brutalizes the minority, the woman, the different. Inside is scary, outside is scarier. What a thing to do to vulnerable kids. To kids from easier circumstances it does nothing good and carries a subtle bad effect. It means the thing you’re part of is, at its heart, corrupt, so you might as well be corrupt. The ugliness of America becomes a permission structure: We are amoral and you can be, too, Peggy Noonan, The Wall Street Journal, May 25,26 2024.

We are a nation with a birthday. We are a nation with a foundation of faith. We are a nation that declares on our money In God We Trust. She refers to teaching children about Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride and Emerson’s Concord Hymn: By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.  Tell of Plymouth Rock: Here, on this rock, and on this sterile soil, / Began the kingdom, not of kings, but men; / Began the making of the world again

America does have some dark spots in its feasts and some foul-smelling history, but the grand idea of America is still Freedom and Hope. People are not rushing to communist countries; they rush toward the light of Freedom and Hope. Teach your children about freedom, give them dreams, and let their hearts soar.  Teach them about the dream of MLK. Teach them about Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin. Tell them about John F. Kennedy, Amelia Earhart, The Tuskegee Airmen, and Dwight Eisenhower. Take them to patriotic parades and celebrations and explain the beauty of our flag, our nation.  

Tell them about a great Civil War that was fought and, in the end, in 1885, at the death of Ulysses S. Grant, the Union General: Johnston and Buckner on one side of his bier, and Sherman and Sheridan upon the other. The first two were generals of the Confederate army, the last two of the Union Army. Henry Ward Beecher wrote that their marching Grant to his tomb was a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery, and peace war.

As Peggy Noonan rightly says: You come away from that vignette thinking not only “what men,” but “what a country” that could tear itself in two, murder itself, forgive itself, go on.

Tell the children the worst of us, eventually brought out the best of us. Tell your children to raise their heads high and be proud when that flag is unfurled, for it is the symbol of Freedom and Hope.  As I wrote in a poem nearly 35 years ago:

The flag is more than cloth,
It is people, hope, war, and peace.
It is sacrifice and pride.
It is our nation embroidered
                                   And raised to the sky.

                                                       James D. Allen 1990

              Dr. James D. Allen

https://overflowinghope180.org