TODAY’S WORRY
When I was a kid, everywhere we went, I always wanted my father to put the bumper sticker on our car – “Frontiertown!,” “I Saw Santa at the North Pole,” “Catskill Game Farm.” I knew when we got back to Red Bank that all my friends would see the stickers and wish they had been to all those great places. Really, I didn’t even care if I knew the other kids who saw our bumper sticker, I was proud to have been there and everyone else should know, and regret, perhaps, that they had not. Fortunately, my father never caved into my little girl ego.
So now I am seeing all these bumper stickers – “Support Our Troops!,” ” Proud to Be an American,” etc. Are these people just like I was when I was a little girl? They are proud to show these stickers but there is, perhaps, the desire to proclaim that one is a better American or more patriotic. True patriotism doesn’t come from a bumper sticker. I think it comes from supporting the ideals of our country as written in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. How many bumper-stickered patriots have even read those documents?
BTW, I checked on the internet and most of the places that sell these stickers are in the “for-profit” arena.