11th Feb 2009, 21:52
I was careful to point out that these are MITIGATING issues. I also said that I'll be buying American because I agree if you or anyone else says that these points aren't sufficient to compose a completely compelling argument. But completely compelling or not, they are real considerations that lead people to buy without feeling twinges of conscience about their choice. Thus they suffer no crisis of patriotism.
If a buyer has had multiple problems with their domestics, they may feel that trying something else is necessary. They may feel very little sympathy for those who did such a poor job of assembling their last car if it was troublesome.
Nevertheless, they will salute the flag, and even give their lives on a foreign field for their country while you and others refer to them as something less than "TRULY" patriotic... simply because they have the unmitigated temerity to own a Toyota.
While this example is fictitious, it would require some kind of unbelievable intellectual blindness to think that there haven't been many of our fallen who owned a foreign vehicle. In truth you would never see them as unpatriotic if you met them. You may see them as misguided in their vehicular choice, but not unpatriotic.
And THAT is exactly my point. There are many who, for one reason or another, love their country but drive a foreign vehicle. You shouldn't be so quick to label people whom, as I said, you've never met, whose experiences aren't yours, and whose decisions are thus different from yours.
11th Feb 2009, 17:24
"I don't feel that a person can be TRULY patriotic and at the same time help bring about the destruction of an entire American industry and destroy the lives of millions of our fellow citizens."
Then there must not be a single innocent person in this whole country then. At one time untold millions upon millions of Americans made things in factories. I collect antique radios from the 20's-50's. If I work on one, ALL of the components (tubes, diodes, capacitors, and cabinets) are made in the USA. There were hundreds of brands of radios too, and after that, TV sets, stereos, and Hi-Fi systems. All Made in America. But one by one, companies like Zenith, RCA, Crossly, Philco, GE, Atwater Kent, and others suffered the same fate: They were done in by cheap imports or the result of those companies outsourcing their manufacturing elsewhere. The US consumer electronics industry died primarily in the 70's. They are all long-gone now, and with it the millions of jobs that put these products on American shelves. I know for fact that every single person in this country has either a TV set, a radio, or a computer. ALL of them are made somewhere besides the USA. Thus when you say that people who buy foreign wreck US jobs, then you yourself are also guilty, and so am I. We all are.
But all is not lost. We have a choice in this country, and if one loses a job in one industry, then he/she has the right and ability to change to adapt. I work in the tech industry myself and prior to that was in another industry and had to make a dramatic change in my life by getting an education and learning new things. For those millions who are losing their jobs, they have the same decisions to make as I did, and thus it is their responsibility to make that choice, not mine. Do I like the fact that manufacturing is disappearing from the US? No, not at all. But the reality is inevitable. I imagine that any day now we will be getting cheap Chinese cars, and once we do, put one more nail into the Big Three's coffins. History happens. Life goes on.