A Comment From Yesterday's Students Win Right To Hold “American Pride”

Wait. Please explain the difference between National Pride and American Pride in reference to the United States of America? Has pride in America, the investment of over a hundred generations of American citizens coming from around the world become something else this week? 

When last I looked, being American meant being a citizen of the U.S.A. who not only accepts, but embraces the concept and implementation of becoming an American and promoting the Republic. Was I asleep when it became a constant national celebration and embracing of the tenets of from where the citizens came and some official acknowledgement and wholesale adoption of those countries' national and religious endeavors, that America is not the "melting pot", but a place where those secular and religious activities of countries of origin must be adopted? 

Certainly, over the centuries, America has adopted those, but in a very gradual manner and only in ways that served to strengthen the Union, not to fragment it into bits and pieces comprised of segments with widely differing values. 

Is it gone, that time when people came to the United States to become Americans, to join the masses who had a grand sense of patriotism for their new found country, who BECAME Americans by choice, and expected all others to do the same?

My sense of pride comes from being an American. Not a something-or-other American (insert religion or country of origin), but an American, a product of belief in the Constitution of The United States, the notion that democracy isn't perfect but it's the best show in town, and that America is built upon the ideologies not only of the Founding Fathers, but of the best of the ideas of those who followed them, ideas that promoted and enriched the functions of our national identity. 

It's all well and good that you or your people came from whatever country. They/we all did. All of them/us. What matters is that we became and are ONE people, the American people. 

Celebrate being whatever as subset of being an American, but do so with the conviction that you are or have become an American, not that you are a (insert country of origin/religion/color/creed) living in America. There's a difference, one that seems to escape the recognition of too many.