National heritages Are our identity.Justify
Answers
Explanation:
I’m not sure what you mean by the “national heritage”, but I think it’s important for citizens of a nation to have something anchoring them together, something to call themselves. And just as important that it not be nationalism, racism, or many other unhappy “isms”.
There needs to be a shared ideology without creating groupthink or insisting we all see things the same way or forcing everyone to have the same religion, or forcing them to have none.
It’s hard to promote this idea because people tend to think it looks like something from the above lists of not-nice and downright dangerous stuff.
Currently the United States has a big problem because we have one camp who believes that a strong national identity = nationalism, and the other believes that nationalism = patriotism. They’re both wrong, and everyone is confused.
Since about the 60s or so, I’m led to believe, the consensus emerged that Christianity is not cool anymore, and causes more harm than good, and in the midst of the very good thing where we decided to be more inclusive and accommodating of other cultures and religions or even lack thereof, we forgot to take care of the vitally important national identity. We rejected the former one, and never adopted another, but are rather content to float aimlessly in a mess of opinions about who we are and what we are about, and hope that the global village assigns us something wonderful or at least lets us continue drifting along.
A national identity to me, is something every citizen of that nation is proud to call themselves and think of themselves as being. Currently, nobody is allowed to be proud of anything that we can all agree on as citizens (even if not as members of a religion or other ideology).
I think a national identity is possible that doesn’t demand or reject cultural or religious ideologies, but is an additional culture, superimposed upon that which is mixed together here, and can bring some harmony to the confused noise, allowing cultures to thrive together without erasing each other, BECAUSE, not in spite of, this superimposed national culture.
How is such a culture established? It has largely to do with the books and other media we read and base our perceptions upon, whether that’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the Bible or Farenheit 451 or My Little Pony : Friendship is Magic.
I’m not saying there should be a government mandate that all the people must consume this media or that, because that’s wrong on many levels. National Identity is not about the government and is not the government’s job to take care of. It’s the people steering the nation in one direction or another, good or bad, because of how they feel about themselves collectively, and what they take as their responsibility and role in this place.
Ask people what it means to be an American, and I think you’ll usually get either a fervid, but unthinking “FREEDOM!” or a slough of uncertain half-answers. I’d like that to change, but it can’t really until we all have some kind of common, unifying ideal that we count ourselves part of because we’ve read it, and spend every day living by it, alongside our religion and culture and traditions and personal tastes (or lack thereof).
So really it’s about education, not legislation, and not really even tolerance or discrimination. Not group-think, not nationalism. Not even “team spirit”. I think it’s hard to explain because my generation has been without it, and so has my parents’, so we don’t really know what it looks like anymore, and most people think they don’t want it because they think it means going back to the bigotry and xenophobia that existed alongside it in so many communities. We’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater