By Marilyn Duff, Reprinted from Dispatches, a news publication of the Western Journalism Center
October 1996 – We were tooling along Route 5 in northern California when suddenly Mt. Shasta appeared, still glistening white in the summertime after the heavy winter snows. The sight took our breath away. On impulse I reached for my bag of tapes, selected one called “Patriotic Music,” inserted it in the dash and turned it on. For the next 60 miles, we rolled through meadows of flowers, rangeland and little villages, and I began to listen more carefully to the words now emanating from the speakers.
Oh, beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain
For purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain.
It had been a long time since I had heard those words sung from my car speakers. Our patriotic music isn’t given much play in the media nowadays. Children aren’t taught the words as they once were. Popular thought of the past three decades declared it maudlin and chauvinistic, even dangerously nationalist to get misty-eyed at the beautiful images. What about the pollution? What about the injustice to minorities? And even if there was no sovereign country called “America” until after the Revolutionary War, what about the so-called “Native Americans?” How could we sing Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrims’ pride?
And so we stopped hearing God bless America, land that I love, or My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty or Let us pledge allegiance to a land that’s free. As a nation we lapsed into a kind of puzzled silence, half embarrassed by the notion of alabaster cities gleaming.
America, America, God mend thine every flaw.
Confirm thy soul in self control, thy liberty in law.
The words leaped out. “Self control” was once a concept taught to little children, honored as a goal, considered part of being a well-adjusted human being. Then the shrinks became ascendant and the ’60s generation coined the phrase, “If it feels good, do it.” We were told that repression was unhealthy, you couldn’t be good to others unless you were good to yourself, expressing your “self” was all important.
Soon “expressing yourself” meant leaving home and children if a fresher love came along, refusing to be tied down to a boring job, free and unfettered sex, blowing away a “homey” with an assault weapon if he “dissed” you. All of this has been followed inevitably by a soaring divorce rate, fatherless families, 13-year-olds having babies, streets filled with pitiful homeless transients, a pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases, sociopathic children and a violence rate which threatens to make us all prisoners in our own houses.
Now it’s time once again for America to “confirm our soul in self control.” We must find the courage and strength of will to once again put others before ourselves, to honor commitment, to become communitarians who put the common good before self gratification. We must relearn that happiness comes not only from giving in to our impulses, but also from sacrificing momentary pleasure for the long-term well-being of others. We must relearn that standing pat and solving a problem is not only possible, but preferable to running away.
But if we are going to teach our young self-control, we must monitor what they watch and play with. Too many Hollywood films, television cartoons and video games (all of which are sadly replacing books with so many of our young) portray a steady stream of violence, horror and sex. It may take years to turn around the techno-amusement industry which is making billions on our kids. We can’t wait that long. But we can take control of our television sets and stop sending kids to any old movie they beg to see. We can also build our own film libraries with videos of real people who overcame their problems through self-reliance, determination, resourcefulness and human goodness—and set our children down to watch them. Films like Young Tom Edison, Captain’s Courageous, Pride of the Yankees, Battleground, and Young Mr. Lincoln deserve a place on our shelves next to The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or Pocahontas.
And if we are to “confirm our liberty” it may have to be “by law.” Such efforts are already underway, but it will take courage to follow through. By law we must stop rewarding unwed births with more welfare. We must stiffen penalties for drug dealing. If television won’t control itself, we must demand the technology to block offending channels from our homes. If Hollywood won’t clean up its act, we must demand a ratings system that really reflects film content. And when rap stars protest and film producers yell, we can remind them that they still have the right to produce their high-tech pollution, but we as parents have the right to block them out, and happily withdraw our kids from their market.
This is the greatest country in the world. The United States is exceptional for its Declaration of Independence, its Constitution and its Bill of Rights, possessed by no other nation. Our public schools must be made to teach this to children again. If they won’t, we must get our taxes back in the form of vouchers and start our own schools. If they won’t teach the words to our great music, we must create schools where those words are taught. And whenever we hear that great music ourselves, we should not only listen to it but sing out with pride. 
