This Country? My Country. Our Country.

The media appears to be mandating a style manual that requires them to say "This country" whenever they refer to the United States of America.  Whatever happened to "My country" or "Our country?"

Whatever happened to Americans having a commitment to the USA?  How could you better signal your lack of investment in the United States of American than by constantly referring to it as "This country?"

The people of Fox, CNN, NPR, ABC, and CBS all refer to "My country" as "This country."  We need to ask ourselves why are they so blatantly telling us that they have no deep stakes in the country whose central principle is a respect for the many and broad rights of the individual?  Yes, many of those media people are authoritarians with a commitment to destroying the American Principle.  Many are the political evolution of slaveholders, the enforcers of Jim Crow laws, educational segregation (Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden and a host of other Southern Democrats), segregation within the government (Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt), the creation of the welfare state and its chains of dependency (FDR, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Obama), including the discouragement of two-parent families, and a host who argue that some ethnic groups and females are unable to compete in a free market and must be provided with government-enforced advantages.

But why are the Fox people, who buy into at least much of the American Principle, going blindly along with this alienation for individual rights and for all those individual freedoms that the United States of America advanced more assiduously than other nations did throughout its history?  Apparently, they do not understand how they are signaling their own lack of integrity to the most important commitment a civilized people can make.

Freedom-loving Americans must take adamant possession of the American Principle that every American has many and broad rights which no combination of elitist and no-nothing authoritarians should be allowed to suppress.  We should be proud to be Americans, to embrace the American Principle, and to call the United States of America "My country."  When talking to other individuals who share these values with us, as all good people should, we should speak of "Our country."  Do not allow the authoritarians to dictate an alienated style of speech designed to sever our commitment to the American Principle and our country's proud history of pursuing and adhering to it.