When I was a kid back in the Jurassic Era, I watched boxing on TV. Most major fights were in Madison Square Garden, New York. In a championship fight, if either contender was from a foreign country, they played our national anthem and the guest’s anthem as well. So at a young age, I learned “God Save the Queen,” La Marseillaise,” and “La Bayamesa,” the rousing Cuban anthem played for Kid Gavilan. I learned to appreciate foreign anthems just as I learned to honor our own.

As an adult I watched the Olympics on ABC “Wide World of Sports.” They showed some medal ceremonies where other athletes won the gold, not only our own. So kids saw foreign flags raised and heard other anthems. If you claim to be a “citizen of the world,” it would be nice if you could identify one foreign flag or whistle one foreign anthem, would it not?

The more I learned about other nations, the more grateful I was to live in America. Perhaps that is the reason today’s leftist “educators” teach kids so little geography or history. If kids weren’t such ignoramuses, they wouldn’t be such ingrates.

But now I watch the Olympics on NBC, or rather I usually do not. Medal ceremonies are rarely shown, and even then only when the US wins gold. Kids watching – if any are – learn to recognize not one foreign flag or anthem. How sad.

There are two types of ignorance. The first is negative: I don’t know the value of pi to 10 decimal places. But the second type of ignorance is positive: I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I don’t know foreign flags or anthems. I don’t know much about foreign countries. I can’t point out France or Australia on a map. And even if TV showed a whole medal ceremony with flag raising and anthem playing, I would probably switch channels, or more likely, go back to playing video games.

We are raising a generation that knows a lot about how to be woke, but not much about the real world. We are raising kids who play “Call of Duty,” but have no clear idea of where their real duty lies. It is said that life is a marathon, not a sprint. Wrong. Life is a relay race, and we are dropping the baton in the dirt rather than passing it on to the next generation. No medal for us.

https://www.nbcolympics.com/videos/tearful-parents-sing-anthem-lydia-jacoby-gets-gold-medal

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