History, ideology

I'm in a nonfiction mood, so in spite of the MASSIVE quantity of fiction I got for my birthday (Yay!) I picked up "Lies My Teacher Told Me" with my B&N gift card.

"The U.S. has done more than any other nation in history to provide equal rights for all," The American Tradition assures us. Of course, its authors have not seriously considered the levels of human rights in the Netherlands, Lesotho, or Canada today, or in Choctaw society in 1800, because they don't mean their declaration as a serious statement of comparative history--it is just ethnocentric cheerleading. (169-170)

In ninth grade, before we read Anthem by Ayn Rand, we were assigned to write about the freedoms we enjoyed because we were Americans. Little just-barely-political me was annoyed because I wasn't an American*, and because I couldn't think of a single freedom that I had in the U.S. that I didn't have in Canada; in fact, because of the automobile culture, I had significantly less personal mobility. But America was The Land of Freedom. You didn't question that.

*I had lost my accent by then, I think, so no one can be blamed for not noticing that.