I was raised to be very patriotic. My grandparents all spoke English with an accent and their first languages were Louisiana French and Irish. Maybe as a result of that and of World War II, my parents were as American as possible.
"Wait till you see your flag flying in a foreign country," my father used to say. He was in the Pacific during World War II and visited Japan and China after the war. "There's nothing like it to make you appreciate the Stars and Stripes."
We flew the flag on every holiday and special occasion, said the Pledge of Allegiance every morning at school with our hands on our hearts, and George Washington's portrait by Gilbert Stuart hung in every classroom. I played Thomas Jefferson in the Fourth of July pageant when I was six (I was the only one who both had a ponytail and could pronounce "Declaration of Independence"). We learned to detest Tories and never heard that the British once burned down the White House. I grew up in the last generation to learn the triumphalist version of American history, before civil rights and feminism and multiculturalism and Vietnam changed the textbooks.
So my first Fourth of July parade since I was a child was an emotional moment for me.
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