Parenting & Family Quote by John Ratzenberger

Nostalgia is doing a lot of work in Ratzenberger's line: "From what I can see" frames the claim as common-sense observation, not ideology, while quietly insulating it from counterevidence. It's a soft opener that still lands as an accusation. The target isn't just "kids" but the adults, institutions, and culture that supposedly failed to hand down a certain kind of American confidence.

As an actor closely associated with cozy, mainstream Americana (the everyman appeal, the voice-of-your-childhood familiarity), Ratzenberger isn't speaking like a policy wonk. He's speaking like a neighbor at a cookout. That matters: the sentence is built to feel nonpartisan and parental, a concern more than a complaint. But the subtext is political, because "pride in their country" is never neutral. It's shorthand for a contested package: reverence for national symbols, a more heroic story of U.S. history, and suspicion that schools and media have tilted toward critique.

The phrase "don't learn" is telling, too. Pride becomes something taught, like multiplication tables, not earned or wrestled with. That positions patriotism as a baseline civic product and frames dissent as a failure of education rather than a response to lived experience. In the current culture-war ecosystem, this kind of statement doesn't just mourn a loss; it draws a boundary between "healthy" patriotism and "ungrateful" skepticism, inviting audiences to see generational change as decay rather than evolution.