Almost No Americans Hate America

Please, world, can we stop with the "The other side hates America" argument? No one here hates America. We have enough of that coming from the terrorists and other countries.

Liberals do not hate America, they just see ways THEY think America could be better, and use the freedoms at the very core of our American way of life to express their opinions in the hopes of making things better.

Conservatives do not hate America either. Even if Bush and his administration are guilty of the worst charges leveled against them (this is a postulate for a point, I'm not asserting that they are), it doesn't mean that they hate America or were out to damage it.

There are, of course, people who do things for impure motives. Human nature being what it is, I suspect there's quite a lot of that. And there may be people who act contrary to the best interests of this country in order to put their own interests or their own agenda first. But this does not equate to hating America.

It is NOT contradictory to hold the following two beliefs:

• This is the greatest country in the world.
• There are things about this country which could be better.

The truth is that no matter how good any creation of human hands is, it is never perfect and there is always room for improvement. I would argue that it is at the very heart of LOVE for America to want to continuously improve it, to want to make it better for our children than it has been for us.

We may not agree on what will improve this country, and we may not all be acting with the goal of IMPROVING the country as our primary motive, but it's downright deceitful to claim that any class of people here is acting with malice towards the country. And it weakens your argument against them.

(No one on this blog has asserted this argument tactic, but I've been reading through a batch of other news sources and blogs tonight, and I've run across several examples of the tactic I herein decry. "The NYTimes is compelled to hurt America..." "Liberals hate America". "Neoconservatives hate America". If I were to believe everything I've read tonight, I'd have to conclude that there's almost no one in this country left who loves it, and that's clearly absurd.)

Copyright (c) May 22, 2005 by Liam Johnson. http://www.liamjohnson.net