Reflection 3

One thing Professor Hass tried to teach us was what is nationalism and patriotism.  I found myself finding out what they were during the beginning of the class when we read books like Little Women.  This book portrayed patriotism in the sense of the father going to war while the children and mother stayed home in full support of their husband/father doing whatever they could to help with the war.  The entire society was supportive of the war and their soldiers.  Throughout the class this type of nationalism seemed to dwindle as we progressed from war to war, decade to decade.  More recently we see patriotism a more broken than in previous years.  Being anti-war has been seen as extremely unpatriotic whereas now patriotism doesn't depend on being supportive of war and few seem to still think so.  Within WWII and into the current war on terrorism society has been becoming much more unsupportive of the governments decision to go to war.  At first those people were seen as being unpatriotic and unsupportive of the nation.  Now the idea of patriotism has been altered to include those who don't necessarily agree with the government and their decisions.  Being more opposed to the government and speaking out against it is seen as still being patriotic.  There are still many people who are not patriotic and decide to be completely against the nation as a whole including many celebrities which is unfortunate to see because of the impact they have on the media and in turn the media has on the population.  It would be nice to always have a unified nation but, it is good to see that we have not totally lost our unity when it comes to threats of our nation.  The reaction to 9/11 was really good since we all came together to ban against terrorism. Unfortunately the unity didn't last very long but it is reassuring to see that it is still possible to do in our nation.