We Americans...Must Be Americans

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As Memorial Day passes, pause with me to celebrate what We Americans have in common.  There is a certain hypocrisy, if I may say so, enveloping us.  You can see it in the most recent resuscitation of class warfare, adversarial race relations and visible efforts to turn Americans, one and all, against each other.  I have had my fill of this hypocrisy. 

 

Interestingly, until liberals of all stripes began chastising America for being insufficiently sensitive toward each other, most Americans felt that we were imperfect, but a generally positive, hopeful, historically idealistic and upwardly mobile society, a group of rather unrepentant dreamers who wanted to make good things happen. Oh yes, and we had an improving sense of perspective on each other, one in which differences of race, creed, age and station were secondary to being American, a defining quality. 

 

 

That is, we were doing a reasonably good job — imperfect and subject to individual cases of utter failure — but a reasonably good job all the same, of giving each other the benefit of the doubt, forgiving errors in judgment, accepting that achievement was hard work, hard work produced results, and wealth, or what we used to call “getting ahead” or “improving our lot,” was a good thing. 

 

It was a good thing for us, and for everyone.  Indeed, we wished it upon each other and accepted with joy the notion that others, by working and making something of themselves, offered us ways to follow suit.  Although we slipped, we collectively had the humility to see, in examples great and small, that “there by the Grace of God go I.”

 

We also had determination.  We asked questions like, “If I can dream it, why not do it?”   That is why, as a People — not as a Government, but as a Sovereign People — we grew stronger and faster than any Nation ever has in history.  We invented more, trusted the individual, tried to limit our government, assumed personal risks, and gambled our lives for the sake of others more than any other People in world history.   We did so without fear or self-consciousness.  Our Constitution was, as we all know, the first of its kind in the world.  Our Wright Brothers first to fly, Lindbergh first across the Atlantic, Americans first on the beaches of Normandy, and our footprints first and only on the Moon.