America, On Her 230th Birthday
When I was a boy we grew up playing Army. We were fighting the Nazis, and nobody wanted to play a German soldier. German soldiers had to die as we brave Yanks blazed forward to liberate the World from Axis terror.
We were the Good Guys. If there is a lesson that is taught to every American boy and girl it's that we are the knights of the world. We came over and put the coup de grace on the Kaiser. We stomped Hitler and Tojo. John Wayne bravely defended our settlers against those savage Indians. We were defending the world against tipping dominoes in Vietnam. Growing up in Ohio, local history trips pointed out the home where John Brown once stayed, and focused on the Union role in the overthrow of slavery. Again and again America was on the side of Good, and the side of history. We were rich, and we were generous. We stood for truth and democracy and everything that is good in the world.
The problem is that's not exactly true, and i think the acceptance that America can do Evil is an important difference between the Right and the Left. The Left feels like we were led to believe a lie, that America has too often turned its back upon its own stated principles. The Right believes America is exactly what it says it is, a force for light in the world and our flaws are mere pimples upon Miss Teen America's smiling face. When it acknowledges them at all. We in the left focus on a flawed system while the right sees a great system with flawed people.
The question to me is do you see the glass as half empty or half full?
Neither of these pictures is accurate. To my friends from the left I wish to say that America remains a cool country. We have for years stood between the Israelis and their Arab enemies, dragging them back to the peace table. We didn't respond in time to Rwanda, but it was American intervention more than anything that beat back Serbia's xenophobic wars. We were the people who stopped Britain, France and Israel from seizing the Sanai and its canal. We never really joined into colonialism and those who point at the Philippines you should remember that a German fleet was standing by to take them if America hadn't stepped into Spain's vacuum. We have left a place when our treaty obligations have called us to do so, {unless you're a native Amerian} and I think we'll leave Guantanamo Bay too, if only Fidel Castro will die in time. It was America who came to the aid of Muslims in Bosnia and Croatia, and in other lands. We mostly mean well in Iraq and who can say Afghanistan would be better off with the Taliban? Our peacekeepers have served far and wide, and we did not use our superpower status as a license for conquest. That remains true no matter what you think of Iraq.
Our soldiers are disciplined and do treat people well, despite the recent scandals. Our courts are basically honest, Americans are hard-working people, and our government is not corrupt by the international standards. We have good governement, no matter how much we seem to hate it.
But we're no angels.
First of all, America claims to support democracy. We do not. We support free market capitalism. America has supported the overthrow of three democratically elected governments (Iran, Guatemala, Chile) because we didn't like the policies of those governements, or in the case of Chile, the outcome of the election. The simple fact is that whenever the democratic process has run up against business interests democracy lost. We wield power nakedly to get what we want, and fairness rarely if ever enters into the equation.
We also like to think America is a generous country. It is not. If you look at giving as a percentage of GDP then America stands Dead Fucking Last among the world's prosperous nations. What aid we do give is almost entirely focused on security interests. Sure we were generous and the Marshall plan stands as a hallmark of U.S. foreign policy. But Americans can't keep living in the past.
We can be a kind and welcoming people, but we are also a lonely and angry people. If America were a tolerant country people like Pat Robertson and Ann Coulter would be nutcases whose books are sold online to other freaks rather than on the prominent shelves at Barnes and Noble. As a people we talk about education, but we have no respect for educated opinions or scholarship as good. We like knowing better than those guys who actually work on knowing someting. Which means we blind ourselves whenever reality contradicts the things we wish were true.
America is like all others in that it is a nation of human beings. That means that America shows all the strengths and weaknesses of human beings. We can be kind, brave and genrous at one moment, selfish and petulant the next. We are mostly good, but we're not better than anyone else. We need to remember that what we have been given a bounty, a favor of birth. It was ony by the grace of God that I was born in Ohio to two well-educated professionals rather than an untouchable who parents cleaned privvies on the streets of Bombay. I grew up never knowing want or hunger of any kind, but had God chosen differently I might be watching my children starve in the Darfur region of the Sudan. I grew up with both the Christian and secular traditions, and feeling like I could make my own destiny. I didn't have to worry about gangs coming to steal what I have, beating up my sister for showing her face or putting me in jail for publicly disagreeing with the President.
In short, we've grown up wealthy in a nurturing environment with honest government, the rule of law in place and just about everything a body could wish for. We take these things for granted. Be Thankful! The Left needs to appreciate the good more often. But to the Right I say, "Don't be smug. We are not God's Chosen People. We're people and if we want to talk the talk we need to walk the walk. We need to remember that we share this world, and hold no monopoly on wisdom. We need to remember that the price of freedom isn't necessarily war, but the less glamorous and satisfying vurtues forbearance and patience
And there lies the difference between the right and left on July 4th. The Right thinks we are a good country, and will always be a good country because we're Americans. The left knows that great countries do great things. The right thinks that in order to make a better world other people need to change. The left thinks that in order to make a better world we must lead by example and change ourselves.