A friend of mine recently directed a question to me: "If liberals do not recognize biological gender, why do they protest for women's rights?"  From decades of association with the left, I know that members of America's Cult of Anarchy and Victimization (the ACAV) would answer that if you protect one victim of our sexist-homophobic-racist society, you are protecting all victims.  Within this worldview that despises all we have been in the past lives the view that the principles of liberty, happiness, and life are based on myths that have been propagated by a powerful elite and that these myths are not only fallible, but based on lies and delusions. 

One such myth is that the Founding Fathers of the USA were responsible and brilliant individuals driven by knowledge of history and deep ethical commitments to create a "city on the hill" (this phrase coming from the New Testament Gospel of Matthew that motivated the original New England settlers).  Another one of the delusions is that the USA respects the rights or even tries to respect the rights of all individuals living under her blessed governance.  That is why they would rather be dead than sing "God Bless America" or "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" or even the National Anthem.  They openly scoff at the idea that we are the land of the free or the home of the brave.

Also, ACAV members openly scoff at the idea of America's existence as flowing from God's providential decree.  To them, our history belies anything godly or righteous; rather, it is a cesspool of exploitation and rejection of individuals and subcultures.  These critics are identified with the atheistic left and believe that the patriotic identification of America with God's blessing is mere hype, that there is no God to bless America, that God is used by the religious right to rationalize exploitation and bullying in the minds of the exploiters just as He was used by slave-holders to justify the unjustifiable.  And if you ask them about the vast numbers of evangelicals who spearheaded the fight for abolition, or the hundreds of thousands who died in the Civil War for the cause of national unity, freedom and equality for all, and for a hopeful tomorrow, they will answer with smug indifference that by allowing Jim Crow to flourish after 1877, the lack of white sincerity and commitment even in the North, even among so-called Christians, was revealed.  Weren't there so many lynchings?  Weren't voting rights denied? Weren't public facilities segregated?  And weren't black enclaves in the North impoverished and rejected even up to our present day?  How is this one country under God?  Either God does not care or the ones who claim to follow God have blinders covering their hearts and minds.  Not one word of gratitude will pass their lips for the achievements of integration, dignity, and wholesome respect based on law for people living here.

The existence of hundreds of years of slavery, the wars with the American Indians and their consignment to reservations, the uphill battle to give women the vote, and the struggles of workers for even a modicum of creature comforts over decades and decades are proof to this cadre of haters that the word "good" or "blessed" or "free" or "peaceful" or "beautiful" cannot in any legitimate sense be applied to the USA that has flourished since colonial days, into its founding, or in the years since its founding.  What an irony it is that the core haters of a positive view of America can be found within the ranks of the Democratic Party.  As Dinesh D'Souza has helped to publicize, the Democratic Party has been an active player in promoting many areas of exploitation that it now pretends to descry.

But the truth is that no other country in history has made as much progress in dealing with its internal disputes and stressors as the USA.  The reservoir of goodwill, courage, enterprise, zeal for righteous action, belief in the family and the individual, and tremendous faith in God has consistently led us to overcoming our faults and to unrivaled achievements in the moral and scientific. 

A great negative hypnosis has taken over the minds and hearts of too many.  Instead of gratitude for this land of opportunity, we are living through a socio-political crisis of great magnitude.  Too many have adopted the vision of perverse thinkers like Howard Zinn, whose college textbook, A People's History of the United States, with its sharp, communist-based criticism of our society, is widely taught and believed.  Through clever bombardment of their psyches by cultural Marxists from the Frankfurt School who arrived here in the 1930s, and later through the Students for a Democratic Society, the hippie drug counter-culture, the bogus black power advocates and defiant radical feminists beginning in the nineteen sixties, the minds of millions shifted away from pride in having saved the world from aggression in World Wars I and II to seeing our blessed country as an exploitative, war-mongering entity.  A collective amnesia began to expand whereby the thrill of beginning anew a life in America for millions upon millions – including this writer's grandparents – is being replaced by an image of damnable oppression as the main theme of our history.  Instead of American productivity and charity being seen as lifting literally hundreds of millions out of poverty at home and abroad, the naysayers are crying out condemnation day and night on CNN, MSNBC, the N.Y. Times, and the Washington Post, and in the mouths of painfully ignorant legislators in the House and Senate.

All this animosity is tied together in a kind of socio-political unified field theory: whites, straights, males, and the top 1% together are the enemy.  All other groups are victims of the false narratives that these four categories of persons support in their common struggle to maintain hegemony in a rotten, capitalist, exploitative system.  Therefore, we must categorically, day and night, in our speech, in our writings, in our voting patterns, in our civic organizations, in our churches, in our informal gatherings over lunch and dinner, and in our clubs, insistently and repeatedly express our gratitude for living in the USA.  We must also express our gratitude for our national founders and forefathers (and yes, foremothers) for their fortitude and commitment.  We must continually try, even incrementally, to inform ourselves about our Constitution and history.  We must regularly remind ourselves and others that we love the United States and that Divine Providence has led us to be a light to all nations.

E. Jeffrey Ludwig has published over 150 articles online promoting conservative values, rationality, importance of faith in God, America first, and pro-Israel values and causes.  He has taught philosophy, history, writing, and literature at universities and secondary schools for many decades  and is author of The Catastrophic Decline of America's Public High Schools.