Celebrating the "national holiday"? Think again.

To my mind, being chilean has never meant anything too great and too fabulous. In fact, I have to say that my lack of patriotism is stronger. I think this is because I grew up seeing contradictions everywhere. In History, for example, they taugh me about original tribes and where they used to live, how they were so uncivilized, how wild and destructive they were, and so many things they used to do when they were a living culture. At the same time, my family was always telling me about the unjustices mapuche people had to coup with. This was because my mom's family has mapuche heritage; that's why I have a mapuche lastname. My mom told me that I should know the meaning of it as minimun, and that i should be proud of it. So, I was caught in the middle of two different perspectives about being chilean. Therefore, I never really have a feeling of belonging. Actually, I hate cueca and the national holidays, and I hate the Parada Militar even more because they seem to be so proud being a country with so many military equipment like if that was actually a way of achieving peace. At the end I realized about everything and discovered that what is considered culture is not even nearly to what people think. You have to pay attention to reality and think a bit about what is going on with the country before celebrating something which you don't even understand. In fact, Chile shouldn't be celebrating at all. Chile (as a government) should be rebuilding houses, helping those who are in extreme situations after the earthquake in the south, eliminating the antiterrotist law that is doing nothing but killing natives who are not even terrorist, paying attention to education seriously, and not rebuilding museums or making shows of lights and expending money in meaningless things.