What are your thoughts on Patriotism in millennials and GenXers?

There are three types of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

If you look closer into those poll numbers you'll see that it comes from a survey that asks how proud they are of their country. They report that only 54% are "Extremely proud". But what about the other 27% who were "Very proud"? That's 81% of Americans who are at least Very Proud Americans. Or if you add in the 14% who answered "Moderately proud", that gives us 95% of Americans who are "Proud to be American."

Only 4% said they were only a little proud (still proud though) and 1% saying they were not proud at all.

Here is the original Gallup Poll article. You can see that there are two trends. One is that there was a spike 2001-2004 and the levels of extremely proud Americans that tapered back to 2000 levels eventually.
If you look at the reference PDF at the bottom you'll see the other trend is that people who were listed as Very Proud and Moderately Proud dropped during the spike and then rose again.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/183911/smaller-majority-extremely-proud-american.aspx

http://www.gallup.com/file/poll/183923/Proud_to_be_An_American_150702.pdf

As a GenX'er (43 y/o) I gotta call BS. I my (albeit small) sphere of friends, patriotism is strong. But, we tend to define patriotism differently than our fathers. We love our country. We idolize our founders, but we distrust our government. Blind patriotism is scarey and dangerous to our Republic.

Just personally, I think that baby-boomers were probably not representative of a cultural norm for American patriotism. Having been brought up in an era when America emerged victorious in 2 World Wars and was the bastion of freedom in the world, I think that baby-boomers and their parents were probably much more patriotic than the generations before them. So what we are seeing now is a shift back to the norm for American patriotism, more in line with historical trends (i.e. regionalism)