PATRIOTISM

I tried to watch Obama's speech on Patriotism, today on MSNBC. I don't know if FOX News carried it. I doubt it, but I could be wrong and have no intention on finding out. To me FOX News is irrelevant.

Anyway, I was able to catch part of it, but I had to do some errands and left the house after I heard Obama saying the following:
" Of course, precisely because America isn't perfect, precisely because our ideals constantly demand more from us, patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy. Ask Mark Twain, the greatest of American satirists and proud son of Missouri, once wrote, "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." We may hope that our leaders and our government stand up for our ideals, and there are many times in our history when that has occurred. But when our laws, our leaders or our government are out of alignment with our ideals, then the dissent of ordinary Americans may prove to be one of the truest expression of patriotism."

There is nothing I need to add to that. It would ruin it. It is so perfect the way he put it!

The only reason I wanted to use it on this blog is to remind my readers, if any, that some of us feel obliged to stick for one person because he was the one elected, regardless of how bad he is doing his job and how ridiculous we look vis a vis the entire world. Or we choose to support him and defend him because he is our Commander-in-Chief, but we forget that WE put him where he is, and we have the right to criticize him and disagree with him. We do not owe him anything, like we do not owe the party anything. WE OWE IT TO OUR COUNTRY. And because of that we dissent. We dissent because he has separated us. Left wing democrats and right wing republicans are fighting for their extremist ideals, while forgetting that the ideals of the common American are to have a united front, where the economy produces jobs; where a health care system takes care of us, of all of us, not only of those who can afford it; where we should have an affordable education structure for everyone without having to mortgage our lives forever; where a scientific research is not limited to concocting new drugs for the profit of pharmaceutical companies, but to develop a stem cell program that once and for all eradicates cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, MS, and other killers; where there should come with an immediate plan to end the outrageous price of gas, such as working towards a new combustion alternative, to end this dependency on the little oil left in planet earth. (Oil is not corn, which you can grow every year. There is always less and less oil from the fossils of millions of years. ); and where we could improve our image in the world. NO, WE ARE NOT ALONE. We live in a planet of 6 to 7 billion people, and what we do affects everyone else. What we don't do affect us, more than anyone else.

But because this is a great country, we know it is going to turn around thanks to all the brave people that are fighting (intellectually) to cause this much needed change, not to be unpatriotic, according to many.