What do I love about America? Well, it’s got less Indians in it than it used to. That’s a joke. I guess what makes me hopeful for America is that we had those yearning to be free, who took the gamble of a better future, and the founding fathers who risked their lives to sign a Declaration of Independence, which states that . . .
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and institute a new Government.”
That right there continues to give me hope for the future of America. Men wrote those ideas over 200 years ago; it was a radical departure from what came before it, which was a king or queen and their inbred children.
We are a nation of immigrants, and it has created a hybrid culture that is truly remarkable. If we remember what American Exceptionalism really means: that the U.S. is qualitatively different from other nations because of a uniquely American ideology based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, republicanism, and populism.
I love this country because of its rich history of standing up for the little guy in the face of the big guy. That we eventually get things right, even if it takes a while.
We still have that Declaration of Independence and the Constitution! And yes, I’m re-appropriating the Constitution from Right-Wingers who use it for cheap emotional effect but probably haven’t read it.
Just think of the Bill of Rights! We take too many of those rights for granted. Of course, not the second one; everybody knows we have to stay vigilant about the Second Amendment because, if we don’t, it will lose industrialists’ money, specifically gun manufacturers’ money, so they spend a lot of money reminding everybody how important it is.
Boy, imagine if we could invent a gun that shot nothing but Fourth Amendment protections. But that is getting us back to what is wrong with this country.
“There is nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what is right with America.”
–Bill Clinton, impeached
We have an immigration problem, and who better to fix that problem than a nation of immigrants?
We have a financial crisis, and what better to lead us out of it than being the richest country in the world?
I think it’s great that we share this North American continent with Mexico and Canada, yet we are the only ones who call ourselves “Americans,” and so does everyone else. I don’t know if that is hubris or just because it would sound stupid calling ourselves “United Statesens” or “United State-ers.”
Plus, don’t overlook the reason we will always be the greatest nation in history, and that is because we saved the world from Fascism and Communism. There is no mistaking that. So that will remain forever a big deal; we saved the world from the Nazis and went to the moon. Those are super big things. And we did them, because America is, at its best, the best of humanity.
And we continue to get better; we continue to go forward and not backward. The nation has gone from bombing black churches to electing a black president within two generations.
And we have Silicon Valley and the two biggest computer giants, Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs—their products have enriched and annoyed our lives beyond measure. Americans dream the future.
We still have the FDA and the EPA and FEMA and Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. We still do lots of great progressive things. We just passed the Affordable Healthcare Act. We did it. It’s flawed and not the right fix, but it is a step in the right direction. The point is, we keep going forward, not backward, getting better not worse. The problem is not the people of America, but when ruling institutions work for the moneyed elite and lose touch with the people.
With all that is at stake in this country, we have had the peaceful transfer of power now for over two centuries. As we look around the world, we realize that’s something. Forgive me for sounding like Sarah Palin, but “golly gee!” Egypt didn’t last through one term before the military ended their democratic experiment. We have somehow managed 230 years of peaceful transfers of power; that’s 43 times, we have remained committed to that principle.
And the country is becoming more liberal and more progressive every day. We are still filling up this country with immigrants, which, if history is any guide, can only be a good thing for America.
Yes, there are still a few death rattles of darker days that surface from time to time—minority voter suppression, race baiting, the banks that are “too big to fail” that continue to extract wealth from this country, but we are moving forward and will get better.
Plus we have better restaurants than most other places. Let’s just start with New York and San Francisco, which to the foodie, appear to be cities set up just so we could eat at their amazing restaurants. San Francisco alone boasts of 23 Michelin stars awarded inside the city limits; that’s 2.9 stars per 100,000 people. As Ron Paul would say, “Not too shabby.” And Manhattan does even better by posting 4.2 Michelin stars per 100,000 people. Sure, it’s no Lyon, France, or Bergamo, Italy, but if it were, there would be absolutely no reason to go to those places.
America produced Bruce Springsteen. If that was our only contribution to the music scene, we could hold our head high, but it doesn’t even scratch the surface. Americans don’t just play music, we invent music. Americans invented Jazz and Blues and hip-hop! Let that knowledge fester in the pride pod! We produced Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra . . . THE BEATLES!
We invented stand-up comedy, which up until very recently was strictly an American phenomenon. Think about that—there are plenty of other countries with no stand-up comedians.
How sad for an entire nation to go through life not knowing how horrible their airline food is and how different guys are from women. But we don’t have to worry about that because we are AMERICANS and we have Bob Hope, Jerry Seinfeld, George Carlin, Bill Hicks.
How about Hollywood in general? Our entertainment industry is the envy of the world, what other country could boast that they are currently funding and producing Fast & Furious 8!? That’s right, NONE. George Clooney didn’t move to Canada to make it in movies, but Michael J. Fox moved to America, didn’t he?
And we still try to solve problems around the world; we have a genuine commitment to humanitarian efforts around the globe. Even the warmonger George Bush turned heads with his AIDS initiative in Africa. Have you ever heard of the Russian Aids Initiative? Didn’t think so.
What else can I tell you about my country that hasn’t been said already? The best thing about this country is that I am allowed to write this book that criticizes all the corrupt people who own and run the country. We really do have freedom of speech, which not even Canada has. Betcha’ didn’t know that, aye?
Bottom line is that the majority of Americans still believe in the very progressive ideals this country was founded on, and that will fix all of our problems. We have freedom, we have liberty, we might have to constantly fight to safeguard them from tyrants, but we have them, and we have a commitment to them on paper in the form of the Constitution.
And that is why we have people like Private Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, who are willing to risk everything so that our country can be better, can live up to its ideals, so the American people will know what its government does in the dark.
If you’ve ever read Private Manning’s letter to President Obama, you know the kind of patriot he is and how badly we need him and more like him. If you’ve never read it, then I will include it for you here. Read this, and tell me this guy is an enemy of America:
“The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We’ve been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact, we’ve had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
“I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing.
“It was at this time I realized that (in) our efforts to meet the risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity.
“We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.
“In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.
“Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown out any logically based dissension, it is usually the American soldier that is given the order to carry out some ill-conceived mission.
“Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, and the Japanese-American internment camps—to mention a few. I am confident that many of the actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.
“As the late Howard Zinn once said, ‘There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.’
“I understand that my actions violated the law; I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intent to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.
“If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society.
“I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have a country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.”
Now if you are like me, that letter surpassed anything I ever thought he would say, and it made me choke up a little. The guy my country tortured is a super patriot, who knew?
My pride for my country comes from the Occupy Wall Street protesters who did the most American thing you can do: protest in the streets. It’s the Philadelphia Police captain who put on his uniform and joined the OWS protesters because he realized he is them and not the corporation who bought the politician who ordered him to knock his fellow citizen’s head in.
I get pride from our supposed Public Enemy #1, Edward Snowden. If the news reports are to be believed, this little anti-American asshole is nothing more than a creep with a narcissistic personality disorder . . . this being said by grown men who put on make-up and sit in front of a camera for a living.
In the words and deeds of Private Manning and Edward Snowden, I feel the same spirit that inspired the Founding Fathers to write the Bill of Rights.
“You can’t come forward against the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies and be completely free from risk, because they’re such powerful adversaries that no one can meaningfully oppose them. If they want to get you, they’ll get you in time. But at the same time, you have to make a determination about what it is that’s important to you. And if living—living comfortably but less free is something you’re willing to accept—and I think many of us are; it’s the human nature—you can get up every day, go to work, collect your large paycheck for relatively little toil, labor against the public interest, and go to sleep at night after watching your shows.
“But if you realize that that’s the world that you helped create, and it’s going to get worse with the next generation and the next generation, who extend the capabilities of this sort of architecture of oppression, you realize that you might be willing to accept any risk, and it doesn’t matter what the outcome is, so long as the public gets to make their own decisions about how that’s applied.”
These are the Americans who are willing to give up all that America has to offer in order to make it better. These are the Americans that will make the future better. They have always been here throughout its history. That’s the America I know. That’s the America I love.