There are many things that can make a person feel patriotic. Apple pie, baseball, binge eating and hanging an American flag off the corner of your television are some of the more common ones.

There are also some perfect situations for multitasking these patriotic motions, such as sitting down to watch a baseball game on a television with a little American flag hanging off its side when your baseball buddies come over to binge eat apple pie. Eventually the baseball game would cut to a commercial and the atmosphere in the room would become tempered a bit, unless, of course, you had the fortune of coming across a commercial featuring John Mellencamp’s ‘Our Country.’

For those who do not know, Mellencamp sings in a popular advertisement, ‘Well I can stand beside ideals I think are right / and I can stand beside the idea to stand and fight,’ while images of Rosa Parks sitting on a bus in Alabama, American soldiers running through the battle fields of Vietnam and flooded houses in New Orleans flash across the screen.

It is actually a somewhat touching ad in its intent ‘ until the gigantic Chevy Silverado appears in the picture and an announcer narrates, ‘This is our country, this is our truck.’ At this point one (hopefully) realizes what a sizable chunk of propaganda just came through the television screen on the back of the Silverado’s roughly 2,000 pounds of payload capacity.

Chevy, officially known as Chevrolet, is a division of General Motors, is one of the world’s largest auto makers and has traditionally manufactured cars within the United States. While Chevrolet may believe that people watching their advertisements would buy into their catchy lines, like, ‘Our Country, Our Truck,’ and even, ‘An American Revolution,’ the truth is that most people with even a trace of national pride are disgusted by Chevy’s cheap tactics to make money.

Most Americans would rather go back to the days of hearing Bob Seger vocally climax on ‘Like a Rock’ for Chevy commercials than see some of the most valuable moments in American history ‘ the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Vietnam War, Hurricane Katrina and the bright lights that shine from lower Manhattan in memory of the events that occurred on 9/11 ‘ soiled in a car commercial and fueled by the shameless executives of Chevrolet in the name of profit.

As American consumers it is our responsibility to tell these big companies what we deem acceptable and what we do not. It is clear the folks at Chevy don’t get the picture, which is a reflection on us, the consumers, of their product ‘ our voices are not being projected well enough. If Americans would stop buying Chevrolet products and instead purchase another American-made vehicle, our message would surely be heard by the bigwigs at Chevy. And that would be an American revolution.