Everyone Wants To Come To America
This is an issue which can get me taking off into all sorts of different tangents. Most who read my stuff know that I am not an adamant defender of American policies, either currently or regarding the recent past administration or through our history as an expanding nation. We have had our many collective compromises and failures of which few are truly proud. But – as a nation, and I personally believe it is something deeper than nationalism and even deeper than religious dogmas which may contribute to the collective myth, a fundamental drive that has propelled the concept of “America” is the desire and hope of some realization of equality and freedom and all the supplemental associated ideals – justice, individualism, opportunity to name a few.
In recent years we, as a nation seem to have been sidetracked. We have seen the “dream of America” hijacked and redefined as whatever is best for the corporate structures that control and manage the economic system we have so lackadaisically become addicted to. We have forgotten the dream of our grand parents and ancestors that foresaw something greater than world domination via corporate economics and military power. Many of our ancestors left homelands precisely for the reasons we now see attributed to what our nation has become. Very few will deny that as a nation we are in need of drastic course correction. Fewer would agree as to what the nature and direction of that correction should be.
A short time ago a music video was released titled “Born Again American”. Essentially I found this to be a gripe session by a fundamentally religious mindset crying in their cornflakes over economic hardships, and a rallying cry to re-embrace what are religious fundamentals in hopes of regaining our once held “moral” leadership and supremacy in the world. The only thing that I can agree with this song and video on are the fact that as a nation we have lost our direction. But I cannot embrace the fundamentally religious call to the values they espouse. I find these values they embrace to be the same that created the current American dilemma.
America is bigger than any religious ideology … it is if you will … or can accept it … bigger than any notion of “God” or corporate politics. I know this is a stretch for many who can only perceive the world as individual nations or even one world government. But it’s not about any of that. It’s about humanity – and the human’s right to find their own path and god, in an environment guarded from the impositions of any and all forces that would impose themselves on us. It is bigger than our borders – but it is not a mandate to impress our values on anyone, individual or nation, anywhere.
Bob Couchenour
I found myself being mildly irritated by a few of the songs on youtube singing about America as a fearful victim whose citizens view the world with suspicion.
The other day Newt Gingrich proclaimed that he was "....not a world citizen" as Dick Cheney is fear mongering his concept that somehow, we are less safe, now that we have disavowed the use of torture and returned to an evenhanded application of human rights, as is our tradition.
So this song is a statement of my faith in America, the concept we have founded that "......All Men are created equal."
No matter how flawed the application of this principle has been in the past, it is our heritage - And our gift to the World.
My Grand Parents, who immigrated to the U.S. and weathered the Great Depression with stoicism and a deep faith in the human spirit. They did what was right by everyone they met and it is because of folks such as these that America became a world leader.
Some folks, in recent history, have dragged our great country through the mud for profit and power. They have sold out the American dream, leaving in its place the barren nightmare we find ourselves in today.
America had lost Her way. Now is the time to restore the mor