“Updating America’s Symbols” an essay by Norma Brown

Today’s Guest Saturday posts is by Norma Brown of the Ooobie on Everything blog. She originally published this essay at Patriot Update on November 17, 2013.

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Updating America’s Symbols

I’m wondering if it isn’t time to change the symbols of the United States to new  ones more compatible with where our nation is going. Obviously the Bald Eagle no  longer has much to say about America. It is a bird with a massive wing span and  great power that allows it to soar higher than other birds, but its power is  complemented by grace and beauty. An eagle knows what its purpose is. It is  swift and sure. Other birds know better than to provoke the eagle, because the  eagle does not go into battle except to win. How does this magnificent creature  capture the spirit of today’s America?

We no longer soar, nor do we seem capable of soaring. Even if there are those among us who remember what it was like to fly high and wish fervently to return this gift to America, soaring is frowned upon by our rulers. Our new national motto should be “bringing things down to earth,” or “making sure excellence doesn’t get in the way of equality,” or “the best: no better than the worst.” Somewhat like General Electric, our leaders seem to proclaim that “progressivism is our most important product.” The way we are going, with Americans forcibly converted from creators and entrepreneurs to the gray proletariat of all dictatorships, progressivism is likely to end up being our only product. Progressivism doesn’t spin off any jobs beyond those made up by the USG and its multiplicity of tentacles, but it greatly enhances the dependence of individuals on the central government for survival. The only people who benefit from the massively expanded reach of a suffocating bureaucracy are America’s losers, slackers, and leeches. The rest of us get the back of our government’s hand.

No, I’m afraid the beautiful untamable eagle doesn’t quite work as our national symbol anymore. After having been diminished and weakened over the past five years, perhaps America should consider adopting the dodo bird as our symbol: he’s extinct and so is the way of life we enjoyed in America from its founding to the election of Barack Hussein Obama. And so is the glorious image of a nation that stood for what was good in mankind and for opportunity and for freedom. The man from nowhere who sullies the White House has certainly done a great job transforming this country, pushed along by the fervor of the greedy and the envious. We limp along on the ground, unable to rise above the grimy and the mundane. If we are an example anymore, it is a bad example.

And the flag – that is also passé and jarringly out of sync with what we are becoming. When our banner was created, the red was meant to symbolize hardiness and valor, the white conveyed purity and innocence, and the blue represented vigilance, perseverance and justice. Think about it: where is American valor? We have such an edge in war-making technology that launching our weapons against another country is an almost ho-hum affair. No-risk war has become the norm, encouraging us to meddle shamelessly in other nations’ affairs and ignore such principles as territorial integrity and the sovereignty of nations. The views of the people of other nations about those who rule them are as insignificant to the USG and its hounds of war as our own views about the USG are. Our country has assumed the authority to decide who can lead other countries and who cannot, and we have happily carved up other people’s homelands to reward our temporary allies and impose our will. All the while we fool ourselves by claiming that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander: the US, we assert, is the one nation in the world that is not subject to secession of its discontented citizens and the one nation that can never be the victim of aggression by others. Rules are for the weak, not for the strong. And where is the valor in waging wars at 30000 feet or higher, safe and sound while below people are engulfed in destruction? We have automated war-making and created mechanical assassins; we have turned into bogus heroes the men and women who sit at a computer keying in the instructions to kill – just before they head off to the cafeteria for lunch.

Where is innocence and purity? What messages do we beam out to the rest of the world about human dignity and eternal values? Once our movies glorified such things as honesty, decency, hard-work and the family; humor was gentle, intended to provoke a happy laugh. Today our Hollywood idols are the stars of vehicles that often are hard to distinguish from pure pornography and the message they beam out is that America is a hell-hole of greed, excessive consumption and rampant rutting sexuality, a place where there is nothing better to aspire to than having a billion dollars and as many varieties of sex as is humanly possible with as many partners as can be managed. Humor isn’t a medicine for melancholy, but is too often cruel and mocking. America is a place where Disney, who once brought the whole world laughter or tears with Mickey Mouse and Old Yeller, creates false idols who eventually show us what they really are: drugged up satyrs and satyrettes who boast of their perversions and lure our children to their ways. The values we once enshrined in celluloid are scoffed at and ridiculed, while our music glorifies hate and violence.

How about vigilance? We are so preoccupied with the useless and the frivolous, like the enabling of one-world government, that we don’t have time for the essential. We can hardly even claim to have a border anymore, as our government is actively conspiring with countries like Mexico to make sure the US becomes an ever more irresistible target for illegal immigration and illegal voters. As for justice, what is that? The rights guaranteed us under the Constitution and the Constitution itself are under relentless assault from the left and will soon be the stuff of museums rather than part of our daily lives. In New York City the criminals and the innocent get the same treatment or will if the city’s new communist mayor has anything to say about it, and in California people who have crossed the border illegally are given in-state tuition at publicly-funded colleges and drivers licenses, while anybody who isn’t on board with the radical policies of the Democrats is effectively silenced and encouraged to go elsewhere. Is that justice? How about when the Government takes money earned by the sweat of one’s brow and shares it out with people who don’t bother to roll out of bed in the morning for an honest day’s work? Is that justice?

The more I ponder where our country is being dragged, the more I think that the flag should be replaced by some new banner bearing a symbol combining the swastika and the hammer and sickle. Such a banner would far more accurately convey what America is in the process of becoming: an oppressive socialist system under the absolutely control of a corrupt and immoral Vanguard, where free thought is criminal and politically-condoned thought is mandatory. And maybe Ben Franklin was right: perhaps the turkey could be the national symbol: a fattened bird unable to gain any altitude, raised by its masters for their own sinister purposes and fit for nothing but the satisfaction of others’ appetites.