Dichroic Reflections

pride

There's a woman here who keeps a whiteboard posted with annoyingly perky sayings
that are meant to be inspirational. (It took me a long time to phrase that
sentence without using the word "stupid", which already reveals that, in the
jargon, I am probably part of the problem rather than the solution.) Under the
saying of the week, she's written "NEVER prouder to be an
American!"

In the interests of sparing myself the sort of discussion
that happens between people with no common ground, I haven't asked her what she
means by that, but I keep wondering. What worries me is a nagging hunch that she
means it in the sense of, "My country is rich and relatively free, and so I am a
better person than you third-world types, who were obviously doomed to live there
by some karmic failing of your own." I'm sure she'd never put it into those words,
but as far as I can tell, that's pretty much what a lot of flagwaving boils down
to.

Not that I am not happy to be an American myself, you understand;
it's just that I find it hard to be proud of something that was mostly an
undeserved accident of birth. If pride has been earned, it wasn't by me, but by my
grandparents and great-grandparents, who didn't have all that easy a time getting
here, or surviving once they did. If I want pride, I need to do something to earn
it. Being born American isn't enough; doing something to make the place better
after I got here would be.

Of course, I may be underestimating this
woman. Maybe she has done something to make it a better country. Or maybe she
means something different by that phrase. There is also the vicarious pride you
have in a person, group, or even country with which you are associated --like
being proud of your friend for her accomplishments, though you had no part in
them. Maybe this is what she means -- that she is proud of her country for what it
has done.

Though I doubt it.