Editor’s Note: Views expressed in guest columns and letters to the editor reflect the views of the author, not the views of The State News.
Recently, a column was posted in The State News criticizing the treatment of America in Hollywood (“America not what media makes it,” SN 2/29). The author suggested that the American media should present family values, strong morals and the ideals America was founded on. To propose that the morals America was founded on were entirely honorable and strong is to ignore an enormous portion of history. There are amazing aspects to America, but there are also horrible travesties that have been committed in the name of this country.
America was founded on ideals of freedom and liberty, but it also was founded on the backbone of slavery and the genocide of Native Americans. We do not, as the author suggests, have a responsibility to love our country for what it is.
Seeing America as it truly is does not incite love, but rather a desire and yearning to improve this country. America has potential, but ignoring the negatives of America only squanders that potential. It inhibits change for the better, and it erases minority groups who have been harmed by America’s rise to power.
America never could have improved if people merely accepted it as it was at its founding. Critique of one’s government is the reason freedom of speech was so respected by the founders and why they enshrined this right in the Constitution. It is fundamentally American.
Rebecca Masten-Davies, political science senior
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