Teach Immigrants to Love America

We teach immigrants to become cultural Americans. We teach them to become economic Americans.

But we do not teach immigrants to become political Americans, to love this country with heart and mind.

That is what Peggy Noonan writes in OpinionJournal.com. And being Peggy she is very polite about it. Instead of sweeping her snickersnee through a platoon of the usual suspects she just writes:

Who is at fault? Those of us who let the myth die, or let it change, or refused to let it be told. The politically correct nitwit teaching the seventh-grade history class who decides the impressionable young minds before him need to be informed, as their first serious history lesson, that the Founders were hypocrites, the Bill of Rights nothing new and imperfect in any case, that the Indians were victims of genocide, that Lincoln was a clinically depressed homosexual...

In fact, the United States is a political, cultural, and economic miracle, the prototype for the global community of all the nations, all the faiths, and all the races. It is a witness that the people in the village down the road and the city across the world need not be enemies. They could be friends.

When you don't love something you lose it. If we do not teach new Americans to love their country, and not for braying or nationalistic reasons but for reasons of honest and thoughtful appreciation, and gratitude, for a history that is something new in the long story of man, then we will begin to lose it.

For over a generation educated Americans have been taught that the sophisticated position on life is an ironical detachment, especially with regard to the United States, its people, and its culture.

Of course, they have been taught nonsense. The only thing to do with life, and the only thing to do with the United States is to love it.

And if you do, America will love you back.