Weariness of Blind Action
On the topic of complacency and aspiration, I’ll put this into perspective. I personally, along with many of my peers, regardless of political opinion, do not see ourselves as nationalistic and patriotic as the people who either grew up raising us, teaching us, or governing us. In my senior year of high school, a teacher of mine got riled up over some of her students not standing for the pledge of allegiance. She went on about how its disrespectful to refuse to pledge and that it is incumbent upon us to remind ourselves of the countries’ victories and values to appreciate it enough to stand up and pledge. She didn’t take the time to hear us out, and even if she was encouraging enough to spark conversation, she’d be dismissive of her student’s reasons. In her stance, we owe our country because of the things they provide us with and had fought for, ignoring anything negative and faulty about it, and this brought up an interesting idea of what our responsibilities are catered to, and who or what it is we owe our respect to.
In the mind’s of many conservatives, if the younger generation aren’t blindly willing to follow and fight for the limitations of the institutions around us like they are, then that generation of people are being indoctrinated. It is to some unfathomable to consider that we just consciously decide not to fulfill these rules. I assume for a lot of those parent’s or elderly people, that’s because they don’t respect a lot of us in the first place. Much of my age group has been dealt with a terrible hand in terms of the environment we live in. We’ve gone through a pandemic which our country did the bare minimum to help stop spread, experienced or witnessed an abundance of people take immense amounts of money in student loan debt for an education, went through an overwhelming amount of hearing news about or experiencing school shootings, had to experience the worst of climate change yet, arguably went through one of the most polarizing human rights issues concerning abortion, and needed to acknowledge and adjust to the terrifying current living standards of the U.S. There doesn’t seem to be a competent government for our country, and somehow there are still people who expect us to salute the symbol of the nation that, from the day we were born, set us up for a difficult quality of life. Why is it so strange we see it fit to refuse our loyalty? We were being punished for questioning and for feedback, something a school should actively encourage.
