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Team Work

By:  Sandra Price

American team work has been found, with a few exceptions, to be consistent in the history of our country. Family, personal and political issues have been dropped when our country has been attacked by disasters and foreign assaults. There has always been an understanding that during these disasters, we bury our attitudes and work as a team. I'm trying to figure out where and when this teamwork stopped.

I was very impressed by Melanie Phillips, a British writer, who spoke on the culture of England and the difficulty of assimilating all the many foreign cultures that have arrived on their shores. She spoke on the strength of the British culture that is not threatened by anything and I wondered how our own American culture can survive when we are told daily that we are a nation of immigrants. We are, but does it mean we have no American culture to begin with? I wrote about this many years ago and claimed at the time that we had no American culture. I was torn apart, via emails, and asked my readers to tell me what these values were. I did not receive anything worth repeating that that time. I do not consider Willie Nelson a value.

Today I would have at least half of my readers tell me Christianity is the base for our American culture. If true, could this be what is breaking up our teams? Has this caused a division within America that although people may be Christians, their values are not apparent in their own actions and certainly not within the actions of the Federal Government. People are beginning to connect "Christianity" with "corruption." I do know that it has broken up the Republican Party. Prior to 2000 there was a strong unwritten law surrounding the Separation of Church and State. That is now gone!

Could it be possible that my generation is the last generation that recognized "patriotism" as a large part of American culture? All through WW2, Korea and Vietnam we never missed a patriotic celebration, a parade with thousands of American flags and we all looked forward to Memorial Day, the Fourth of July and the President's day (Washington and Lincoln for those of you who may have forgotten). This could not be a California thing but it was to me because that was the only place I had ever lived. The loss of this patriotism was brought home to me when I moved out of Los Angeles County and ended up in the small village of Cambria on the central coast of California. We had a Veteran's hall in the center of town and this is where our patriotic parades ended and the vet's would put on a huge BBQ with all the trimmings including apple pie. I remember having many of my old friends from the L.A. area come up to be a part of this old fashioned celebration. On Veteran's Day we found many WW1 vets who lived in our village and we paid tribute to them with tears of gratitude in our eyes. I am confused about whether our Vets are paid tribute in November (Vet's day) or Memorial Day (last Monday in May). I tend to recognize both days.

Have our American cultural values disappeared or did they never exist? I remember President Reagan giving us a strong support that America was the top nation on the planet and nothing could ever remove our individual love for our country. I will have to admit that our American teamwork was as strong during Reagan's Presidency as it was during and after WW2. He made us all feel proud to be an American. I have seen no other leader in America that can approach his obvious love for America.

We saw a quick return to patriotism on September 11, 2001 but we transferred our patriotism to the television and we had to water it down with hours of commercials. It soon passed when it became a political tool to make the President look good. In contrast, does anyone remember FDR's fireside chats on the radio? He spoke to each and every one of us and even my family forgave him for being a Democrat.

I began to see a disintegration of American pride start to show during the Bush/Clinton/Bush leadership years. The country turned sour during those years between 1989 and the present time. I firmly believe that these could be the years that the history books will designate "the Down Fall of America." These were also years of heavy immigration and did we actually become integrated out of our American basic culture?

Do our schools ever teach of the greatness of America? Do our public school teachers even recognize what America has done to guarantee the freedoms for her own citizens and the citizens of other nations? Do the American family members discuss this at the dinner table? Instead of assimilating the cultures of our new immigrants, we seem to have turned off all of them.

I just hope that the world does not look at American television as a measure of our culture. I find television offensive to me as I was raised without it and chose to raise my kids without it. I'm hooked on CSPAN due to the fact there are no commercials.

My son is in the movie business and has many of his movies shown on all the film stations. Apollo 13 is a classic but between penis enlargement and hemorrhoid relief commercials, it tends to lose something. I own that DVD along with many others just to escape what may be a major American cultural example…..I hope not!

Do all Americans face a destructive future at this time? Do we continue to see the divisions within our citizen's group's end up in a mass of individual agendas? In my younger days the GOP stood proudly for limited government, individual freedoms and personal responsibilities. Why did the GOP give those up? Was it the assault from the religious right that wanted sins legislated? Was it the threat of terrorism that allowed our government to remove our privacy rights? Was it a Republican President who felt he owed the American people nothing in the way of changing the laws and rules and we had better follow him or face a treasonous label? The enormous division in the GOP is simply a reflection of the division between all Americans. The Democrats may have changes too but I've never been aware of it.

America is going to need a quick fix in how each and every one of us look at our country. In peace time our elections are based on how much the government can hand out to the citizens. The candidates pander to the agenda that their citizens will have health care paid for by the government; schools will improve when the government gets the time to do it; our personal decisions are next on the docket for government discussion, and the voters simply wait to see what they can gain from this candidate or that one. Could this be the reason our House, Senate and White House are all those men and women who made the grandest promises to the American voters? Have we sent the message to our government that we await with bated breath for their newest promise of hand outs?

From where I stand I see nothing in the way of fixing the mess we have in Iraq. Nothing coming from the Democrats and nothing from the GOP to give us a clue how this will end. Is the problem based on finding ourselves in an impossible position or is it that our Americans are mired in apathy? Few know or care about the Iraqi mess and a good possibility of seeing it continue in Iran.

When do we begin to heal the terrible rift in our political discussions? I used to look forward to Congressional elections every two years and would gather the names and party affiliations in many key states. It has turned ugly and divisive and it now brings out which candidate is pro-life PERIOD END! Surely this can't be the American culture that everyone is talking about? I assume the old search for Pro-American candidates is gone. Are we voting according to our religious ministers and overlooking the Constitution again? Is this the end game of the Bush Administrations and their followers of Christian judges only?

If this is what Americans truly want, then please stand up and say so. I'm tired of fighting for individual freedoms when it is simply an out of date concept. American voters seem to want a dictator who will leave them alone to watch American Idol which is as close to American values as they can get.