Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country! — Stephen Decatur
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. — Mark Twain
Children must be taught that America is “an exceptional, free and just nation, worth defending, preserving and protecting. — DJT
Stephen Decatur’s sentiment makes me uneasy; I prefer Mark Twain’s.
Teaching children what to believe about America; is wrong. That is indoctrination, not education.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/31/trump-patriotic-education-406521
New NY 23rd 
Funny how coincidences work. I am reading Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions” for the very first time. Here is a passage I read last night:
“The founders were aristocrats, and they wished to show off their useless education, which consisted of the study of hocus-pocus from ancient times. They were bum poets as well.
But some of the nonsense was evil, since it concealed great crimes. For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:
1492
The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.
Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else….
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black. Color was everything.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, and they were meaner than anybody else, and they had gunpowder….
The chief weapon of the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
I don’t think that Republican conservatives or DJT would approve.
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