Pride Goeth Before The Fall

Mike VanOuse has an outstanding article today at the American Thinker that asks the question, and it needed asking, Are You Sure You're Proud of Your Country?  Is that feeling really pride, or is it gratitude? Pride was the sin of the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and it infected the first parents there. It has been with us ever since. Gratitude, on the other hand, is elevating, making us better people than we are naturally. What we may feel is not pride but love of country. Even now, when our country is being run into the ground by scoundrels, kleptocrats and tyrants, we may feel ashamed.  We may wonder what the rest of the world thinks of us.  But patriots still also feel love of country generated by gratitude for being lucky enough to find ourselves here. VanOuse has thus clarified my own thinking on an emotional topic.

But were all those patriotic displays from 911 expressions of pride? What if the question was "How grateful are you to be an American?"

Are you grateful that 100% of those who live in "poverty" in America are considered "wealthy" by 80% of the rest of the world? Are you grateful to live in the only country whose founding documents declare that the people rule the government, rather than the converse? Are you grateful to live free of fear from invading armies? Are you grateful for modern amenities such as electricity, indoor plumbing, wireless internet, Bluetooth, cell phones, air-conditioning, heat, automatic transmissions, power-steering, medical care, etc., ad nauseam?

Sure, other countries have those things. Where'd they get them?

In my own case, my ancestors came from Northern Europe. There they lived under various monarchs, some good, some bad. But all of them exhibited to some degree or another the tendency to tyranny. I have said before that feudalism is the rule by the toughest, most ruthless thug around, who intimidates everyone else to bow down to him on pain of death. That they call themselves "noble" and "king" is only self-aggrandizement.  I am so grateful that my ancestors escaped to America. I read about the goings on in Europe and I shake my head.

Among the seven deadly sins, pride is the chief and progenitor. There is a particular sin named after a city that was destroyed in the Bible, called Sodom. Scripture says that the sin of Sodom was pride (Ez. 16:49-50). Today, practitioners of that proclivity identify themselves by the term "Pride" and wave their own flag. Irony is poetic.

There are also factions of society that apply the term "Pride" to their skin tone, as if that had anything to do with moral superiority. Those who bandy this drivel about demand reparations for cultural sins two centuries past, based on outward appearance.

This pale author's ancestors are 25% French, 25% Irish, and 50% Slavic. The word, "Slav" derives from the term "slave," going all the way back to the Roman empire. There were Irish slaves on the American continent long before the international African slave trade was a thing. Skin color means absolutely nothing when it comes to victimhood.

Although the founding documents declare that "all men are created equal," proponents of "pride" are quick to point out that the men who penned those words owned slaves. Duh. They were born, apart from volition, into a community and family where slavery was the norm. They had no more culpability in the nature of their nativity than the slaves did in their own.

But unlike millennia of generations before them, they did something about it — as did the hundreds of thousands of pale men who sacrificed their lives on battlefields to end slavery. For some macabre reason however, those demanding reparations feign to forget them. Maybe they're not grateful.

Of course, the notion of white supremacy is roundly derided by all right-thinking persons. But then, why is not the reparations movement also derided? Why do some assert that only whites can be racist? Having a love for one's own culture is not evil, but making the whole of your identity out of what in the end is an accident of birth is sinful pride. Moreover, it opens one to the call of those who would enslave us all.

The back of the dollar bill sports the phrase "E Pluribus Unim," translated, "Out of Many, One." It celebrates that America has one culture comprising many members. The modern use of the word "pride" is an attempt to segregate the "one" into contending factions: Re-Pluribus, Un-Unum Us. Division is a strategy to destroy: "divide and conquer."

Most of the people propagating "pride" phraseology do so out of sincere compassion for their fellow humans, calling it "social justice." They don't know that they're being played as pawns in a gambit for domination that, if won, will find them in gulags, branded as useful idiots: blind, pathetic fools.

Once again, you have been warned. Heed the warning.  Go and read VanOuse's article and ponder where we are heading.