I grew up believing in freedom, liberty, democracy and all that good stuff. Somewhere along the line I realized that we're not really supposed to believe in those things at all and that many people don't even know what they mean.
I also discovered that virtually everything we believe about America from Paul Revere to the Alamo to Edison inventing the lightbulb is a lie.
Whether it is "history" or the latest war, the mass media tell us only what the handful of families who really run America want us to be told and most of us end up believing exactly what they want us to believe.
The joke is that much of the truth is there to be found, a lot of it from official government sources. Most of us, sadly, are too brainwashed, too anesthetized, too focused on acquiring more useless crap to bother trying to find out the truth.