Spend a little time in Latin America and you’ll quickly pick up on an unspoken phenomenon: *Studies show American travelers abroad feel a severe deficit in national pride. Instead of experiencing nostalgia for home and the loss of routine from our recent past, we somehow link on to a new country and feel mild pride in something altogether not our own.

I noticed this within the first few weeks of my stay in Argentina. A couple nights of drinking Quilmes and watching Boca Juniors and River Plate soccer with a big wad of quality beef in my mouth and I thought my life had surely changed. I felt a new awareness of connectivity with my surroundings, a complete delight in things not my own. This pride grew exponentially in Costa Rica. I felt as though drinking a few Imperials while spitting out “Pura Vida!” and “Tuanis!” signified an official induction into Tican culture.

And then I came home to America. I looked for America in the airport and found McDonald’s. Driving through South Georgia, I passed trailer parks and confederate flag posts. While I admit these fun and perhaps eccentric, they still couldn’t replace that missing place in my heart. The void of pride was deepening, thickening, widening.

This all changed on a routine visit to St. Augustine, Florida with my mom to celebrate the Fourth of July. We made our normal stops: Barnes and Noble for books and coffee, Publix for groceries, etc. She carried her holiday purse on her side and wore a red and white striped shirt. Indeed, a typical American day. Evening came and we walked to the waterfront for the annual fireworks show. We watched, along with thousands of others, as the night sky lit up in brilliant colors of red, white, and blue. The celebration materialized like any other, yet for me, nothing was more distinctive than the roar of the crowd that night. I laughed aloud as men hollered a combination of remarks often heard at country rodeos and strip clubs. The grand finale sparked a congregated chant of the National Anthem. In this moment my heart beat faster. This was it! At last – my American Pride surged within and throughout me.

The United States of America has a lot to offer its citizens in terms of pride. We’ve a fine country – a country founded on the principles of republicanism and democracy, a country whose landscape is as diverse as it is enchanting, and a country originated and today carried on by individuals always in search of utopia, a place as Alexis de Tocqueville once described, where people came to “make an idea triumph.”

Despite adherence to such principles of freedom and diversity and despite our bountiful resources, Americans remain deficient in pride. Oddly enough, our freedom and diversity comes with a constant push for advancement away from things of the past. We’re always hoping for more equality and more individual freedom than our ancestors. Americans are plagued by a habit of indefinite perfectibility. We’re like Mick Jagger: We can’t get no satisfaction.

Lack of satisfaction and pride are big topics of discussion in political circles today. American political scientists most all agree that we ain’t got none. Where they disagree is in a solution for such a condition.

Allan Bloom (certainly not my favorite, but a man with pointed arguments nonetheless) believes the American education system is to blame. Students today have little knowledge about the Great Books of the world and are ignorant about their own country’s political heritage. They hold genuine contempt for tradition and ritual. Bloom, a conservative, believes our past to be more than just an occurrence; our past actually helps us deal with the present moment. Great books, great thinkers, religion, the Bible, and tradition offer something the present or future moment cannot; these reveal that we are not alone in our being and that our ancestors have struggled to find hope through the same trials and tribulations. The past provides us with experience. Bloom believes if our tradition is lost, a part of our being is incomplete. In order for American pride to flourish, people must first feel connection to a common past.

My hero in the debate is Richard Rorty, the great leftist thinker of the 20th century. In his short book Achieving Our Country, Rorty claims we have to rid ourselves of our “otherness.” Instead of having gay pride, or southern pride, or black pride, or whatever our choice pride may be, Rorty believes we need to focus on commonality, on involving all races and classes in both bottom up and top down movements. Polarizing issues such as homosexuality or more contemporary strategies to preserve otherness by distinguishing groups from one another actually prohibit progress. In contrast with Bloom, Rorty prefers idealism and hope to nostalgia. He insists the means for achieving our country can still be imagined: “You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every morning.” We have to be progressive.

I ditto the words of Rorty. We’ve lost our commonality. Americans live alone together. We scan our own groceries and love to buy “do it yourself” appliances. We purchase private homes in private neighborhoods and go to private get-a-ways. We despise public transportation. We prefer automated teller machines for our banking. To make our lives easier, we have virtually eliminated personal contact from our routines. Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year we act as individuals and nothing more. Only on the Fourth of July do we join together and remember our common past and common quest for utopia in a brief hymn of praise.

I think it’s high time we get progressive and start loving ourselves. We’re not going to have unified pride in a political figure, or a war, or an economic policy. And we shouldn't have to. That’s not what we love about Latin America and it’s not what we should limit ourselves to loving here. I’d like my Argentine and Costa Rican friends to visit and feel some sort of intensity or emotion, as I once did in their home.

I’d like to make a push for a subtle, not in-your-face but in your gut American pride that makes us love being who we are, where we are - together.

Bud Lites, baseball games, backyard BBQs? Who’s in?

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*“Studies show” is a common phrase used by the great Dr. Peter Lawler, who never actually read studies which showed evidence for his statements but emphatically made the claim nevertheless.