An advertisement in The Nation caught my eye. And this ad did what ads seldom do to me, compelled me to procure its offering.
The little red book, identified as a "pamphlet" by the authors, Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer, is entitled The True Patriot.
Thomas Paine with his Common Sense is reincarnated.
As the authors concede in their pamphlet, not one idea expressed is original to them. So I too, shamelessly, take inspiration from them and incorporate ideas that I read in The True Patriot, reinforced with ideas that I have read over and over and over again in this and other political blogs, into yet another harmonic to recapture patriotism.
As our political machinery now seems destined for an epochal change, a tension of the repulsion from patriotism has been welling within me, to a bursting point. When I used to listen to that transfixing anthem I’m Proud to be an American, I would nearly be overcome with bursting emotion. Now, I cringe when I hear it.
This little red pamphlet ruptured the bung holding back my fomenting frustration over "patriotism."
This little pamphlet has given me hope.
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