American pride can’t be sold. It can’t be purchased either. You don’t get it when you buy a flag for your home or car. You won’t find it after placing a red, white and blue pin on your shirt. And you can’t feel it after slipping on a brand new T-shirt you bought at a gift shop for $9.99.

A price can’t be placed on patriotism, because it can’t be found on the surface of our skin. American pride runs as deep as the crimson color of our blood.

When I traveled to San Diego this past weekend to cover Eastern’s football game, I noticed that everywhere I seemed to go, there was some vendor trying to make a quick buck off the biggest tragedy in this nation’s history.

Airport gift shops in St. Louis, Las Vegas, San Diego and Phoenix all were filled with dozens of different T-shirts “commemorating” the event. There was everything from simple shirts with an American flag on them to ones bearing the twin towers as a symbol.

Airports weren’t the only place. Shops in downtown San Diego featured such shirts in store windows. In a matter of minutes, a T-shirt merchant on the boardwalk would print any of a dozen different designs related to the terrorist attacks on the spot.

They beared such sayings as “We will never forget,” “Don’t tread on us,” and “Someone’s going to pay.”

There were also more extreme shirts near the beach such as one featuring the faces of Iraqi President Sadaam Hussein, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and al-Qaeda ring leader Osama bin Laden.

The shirt had targets marked on the foreheads of each of the three with the saying, “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

Even a group of young Mexican children ran through the streets just across the border from Tijuana, pawning shirts with bin Laden’s mug and the phrase, “Wanted Dead.”

Perhaps the most disturbing shirts of all were the ones that featured the World Trade Center towers with smoke billowing out of them. One shirt featured the smoking towers as the two number ones in the date Sept. 11.

Is this American pride? Does wearing a shirt saying we’ll never forget really mean something? No.

Maybe that’s why nearly all the racks featuring such shirts were packed full, because most Americans don’t need a tacky T-shirt to show their pride. Supporting some T-shirt tycoon on Mission Beach in California isn’t a source of American pride. But donating blood and money to relief efforts is.

Patriotism and pride isn’t found in the threads of an American flag, the cotton fabric of a shirt or the brass of a pin. It’s found in the everyday actions of people whose pride is in their heart, not on their shirt.

It wasn’t in the airport gift shop where I found true American pride this weekend, it was on an airplane. Just before my flight for California lifed off the ground, the pilot got on the intercom and emotionally thanked the customers on the plane, calling it his first full flight since Sept. 11.

The plane than erupted in applause, and an older woman a few rows up wiped a single tear from her eye. You can’t print that on a T-shirt.

Bill Ruthhart is a senior journalism major and a biweekly columnist for The Daily Eastern News. His e-mail address is [email protected]. Columns are the opinion of the author.