Question #3: Is the US truly NATIONALISTIC these days?

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, nationalism is “the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity.”
I believe that the United States is nationalistic in the face of emergency, only. We have the ability to go out in the streets and revel about how amazing our country is at any point of the day, year, or time period. However, the one time that you saw this form of expression truly explode, was of course, after 9/11.
I definitely have to agree with Maineng, Americans have just seemed to have experienced a burst of nationalism; the burst, though, faded away not long after 9/11. After a while, people removed their bumper stickers, and took the flags down from the front of their house. It was almost as if most people were just “Poser Nationalists.” A majority of those people never once went “hoorah!” over the country they live, but give the nation a chaotic element and suddenly we were all so proud of our country. Within a year or two though, it was like it never happened. The nation, in a way, lost their nationalism, and resumed life back on their computers and 9-5 jobs. Now alls people talk about when it comes to the country is “BRING THE TROOPS HOME!”
I lived about 20 minutes away from Washington DC, and after the 9/11 attacks, it was insane the amount of nationalism that surged. There were suddenly people wearing red, white, and blue garb, hanging flags from every crevice they could find, and cluttering their cars with stickers, decals, and paint jobs that were unimaginable. There were protests against terror, new groups created for people to talk about how much they “love their nation”, parades, and tons of other things people did to show their nationalism. Truly, I think this “nationalism” was sparked solely by fear. I’m sure a lot of people felt that if the “terrorist countries” saw how “unified” we were, then they would know we weren’t giving up. Now that this fear is basically gone, we no longer “hold hands with our brothers of the land.”
On a smaller scale, just to prove that nationalism occurs in the face of an emergency, something similar occurred when I lived in LaPlata, Maryland. On April 28, 2002, a twin-tunnel F5 (it was an F5 when hitting Charles County and eventually decreased to around an F3 for the remainder of its trek) tornado hit Southern Maryland. It was the worst tornado in a loooong time. There were baseball sized hail, and trees literally everywhere. Almost 1000 homes and around 200 businesses were destroyed. After the tornado, people put bumper stickers on their car that said things like “This will NOT keep us down. LaPlata WILL rebuild.” There were suddenly people helping clean up the town, there were farmers markets to raise money to help with the devastation, there were shirts, the county flags, stickers. You name it, it was there. The community was now set on working together to rebuild. People took bricks from demolished buildings and put them on display stating that “we will not be destroyed.” Before the tornado though, there was never really anyone helping each other out. LaPlata people aren’t very nice, haha. Due to a state of emergency however, the city worked together and acted as one. .. You can pretty much guess the same basic thing happened like with 9/11. No more flags, no more stickers, no more shirts. It’s back to looking out for yourself, and not really caring how your neighbor’s doing.
The United States, is, in a way, divided by our diversity, but it’s also the thing that brings us together. Our country has the ability to work together even when our culture and races are so different; however, those cultures blend together to create our nation. Once 9/11 happened all of these cultures worked together to clean up rubble in New York. We were, for a moment in time, truly brothers standing together free in our country. All thanks to a terrorist event. Personally, I find it kind of sad that the only time the United States has the “united we stand, divided we fall” attitude. When our country was attacked everyone worked together, because if we stood together as one, they couldn’t tear us down.
The German States remind me a lot of the United States. The German Confederation had lots of different dialects and cultures. But they all knew that they wanted freedom. The states worked together, and eventually became one.

Oh yeah, I don’t really know where to fit this in. But does anyone else find it humorous that after 9/11’s little surge of nationalism, before the nationalism dying out, we had that small period of time where a lot of the country was unified in saying “George Bush was in on it”?
So it basically went.

Our country gets attacked.
We freak out and “stand together as one”
The terrorism meter drops to yellow.
We blame Georgey Porgey.
No one really cares anymore.


Yay America!
Now if that’s true nationalism.

Then nationalism pretty much sucks!


“It isn't enough to talk about peace. One must believe it. And it isn't enough to believe in it. One must work at it.”
-- Eleanor Roosevelt.

And the US, I have to say, pretty much isn't working at it.