"next to of course god america i..."

This post will be a little bit more political than usual. Those of you who have been with me from the beginning know that this never happens, so I apologize for my deviation from my normal substanceless ramblings. Anyway, if you don't wish to read about politics and angry stuff, you might want to skip this post.
Just saying.

Good. You're still with me.
So I'm in a political science class this semester for a gen ed credit, and I'm also, as luck would have it, in an American literature course for my major. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not fond of fighting over politics, but they also know I have some strong political beliefs. And many that are not so strong. So it goes. But this semester has made me much more politically conscious than I ever have been, if perhaps not more politically outspoken. In other words, I've begun to think about America way more than the average college sophomore does or maybe should. Which has been reinforced especially in this climate of re-elections and primary campaigns and Occupy Wall Street and a bunch of other stuff going on that I don't understand.
Before I go on, allow me to say that I am very patriotic. America really is an amazing country. Heck, my religion teaches that its founders were divinely-inspired men who wrote a divinely-inspired document and created a divinely-inspired government. How much more awesome can a country get?
But patriotism can not in itself be considered a virtue. Stay with me. This is what I mean by that. I mean that, unlike virtues, its excess is not just annoying (like if someone had too much gratefulness and began thanking you for brushing your teeth and thanking the stranger on the street for their wonderful smile or thanking the trees for the shade they provide, or if someone had too much honesty and began telling you they think your shirt makes you look 30 pounds heavier than you are or that they once carried a banana around for a week in third grade because they believed that it would turn into a human if they wished hard enough and they accidentally squashed it in their sleep one night and woke up with all the banana-gore all over the sheets and they believed themselves a murderer and felt so guilty they couldn't go outside for eleven days.) People who possess virtues in excess, like that, are annoying and more often than not make you feel uncomfortable, but you go home and forget about it. However, an excess of patriotism is not just irksome and awkward, it can be genuinely dangerous. Think about it.
We had to read a handful of essays about literature and life and all the wonders that go along with them for my literary criticism class this semester, and one of them was called The Politics of Knowledge by this guy whose name you probably don't care about. In it, he quotes another guy (Frantz Fanon, if you're really interested) who talks about the "pitfalls of national consciousness," i.e.) patriotism. Basically that patriotism is wonderful and it can accomplish great things, but it can very easily and very quickly turn sinister when there's too much of it. Then it becomes militant, aggressive, and oppressive. Just think about Germany between the World Wars.
And so comes my point. I was scrolling through Facebook updates this evening and came across this picture posted by a barely-acquaintance of mine. This was one of many hyper-patriotic slogans/images/whatever it can be called that she had posted over the last few weeks, most of them apparently in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I don't know. Maybe I'm all up in arms (like good ol' Uncle Sam up there^) for nothing. But I can't think that this is okay. I think America is so great because of her freedoms. The freedom to vote, to protest the government, to even burn the flag. No, I don't condone flag-burning. I consider the flag as sacred a symbol as the next guy. But I will never seek to take the right to burn our flag away. I will never seek to take away the freedom to occupy Wall Street. And I will never ever seek to take away the right to protest the government.
And feel free to be offended at the government whose decisions I am at liberty to support or not! And feel free to talk about it! Loudly! That's your right, and it's my right too--and I hope when the day comes that I am disgruntled with the American government I won't have supported the removal of that right just to silence your opinions that I didn't agree with.
Including this freaking picture.
So you know why America's so great? Because someone can make a picture like this and post it on the internet and no one will stop them. And because someone else can post a blog post disagreeing with it on the internet and no one will stop them.

Still, guys. I don't know. I just think the Uncle Sam pointing a revolver at your face is a bit overkill.

Uptown Girl -- Billy Joel (anyone else think about 30 Rock now when they hear this song?)