Celebrating America's Greatness

"Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We -- even we here -- hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just -- a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless." Abraham Lincoln, December 1, 1862 

We hear far too much about why the United States of America is not perfect, but we do not hear enough about why the United States of America is great. President Abraham Lincoln understood and eloquently articulated the essence of American greatness: the American project is "the last best hope of earth" to ensure that people can be free and can live without fear of oppression.

Boxing promoter Don King used to proclaim, "Only in America!" Even though King was the king of hyperbole, that statement is far from hyperbolic. In the United States, it is possible for a person to rise from humble beginnings to achieve great things. Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and became perhaps the greatest U.S. President. LeBron James was raised by a poor teenage single mother in Akron, and he became the first active NBA player to achieve billionaire status. 

The American Dream is founded on principles of equality, democracy and freedom: all people should have equal rights (which does not and cannot necessarily result in equitable outcomes), all people should have the opportunity to participate in the democratic process, and all people should have the freedom to pursue happiness as long as their pursuit of happiness does not interfere with the rights of other people. 

Winston Churchill declared, "Democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all the others that have been tried." Democracy is flawed because humans are flawed, but other systems of government are much worse because other systems of government deny equality and freedom to entire classes of people based on religion, race, and/or ethnicity. 

It is chic to criticize capitalism, but an economy based on capitalism is--much like a government based on democracy--the worst form of an economy apart from all other that have been tried. As I noted almost a year ago, the embrace of socialism by an increasing number of people highlights the difference between being educated and being informed: 

There is a significant difference between being educated and being informed. To become educated, one merely has to fulfill the requirements of a specific degree-granting institution; upon doing so, one receives a doctoral degree--but it is a dangerous fallacy to confuse being educated with being informed, because education far too often involves being indoctrinated with false narratives. In contrast, being informed means thinking with an open mind, consuming information from objective sources while considering information from subjective sources with skepticism, and then synthesizing the acquired information to base opinions on facts and logic.

Our politics, our schools, and our media outlets have far too many educated people and far too few informed people. Educated people often spew ideas that Vladimir Nabokov would correctly dismiss as "poshlost." One such idea is that socialism is good. 

It is most likely that I would not be alive today without the United States. Both sides of my family immigrated to the United States more than 100 years ago from areas that Nazi Germany later occupied. The Nazis and their enthusiastic collaborators murdered six million of Europe's 9.5 million Jews, including the vast majority of Jews from where my family used to live. My maternal grandmother came to America from Kobryn (a small city then located in Russia, and now located in Belarus) in the early 1900s. Kobryn's Jewish population on the eve of World War II was around 6500, and the number of Jews from Kobryn who survived the Holocaust can be counted on one hand. My maternal grandfather and his family fled to America from Bialystok, Poland in the early 1900s; one of my relatives was among the 70 Jews killed in the 1906 Bialystok Pogrom. The Nazis murdered most of the 50,000 Jews remaining in Bialystok in the early 1940s.

My father's side of the family trekked from Kosice (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in Slovakia) to Germany and then to the U.S. in the early 1900s. Not every member of my father's family chose to leave Europe or was able to leave Europe before the ascent of the Nazis, and it is painful to think about their fate in Nazi-occupied Europe. A railway went directly from Kosice to Auschwitz.

Without America--and my family's brave decision to start over in a new country--I would not be here to write these words. It would be worse than ungrateful for me to slander America, or to be silent while others slander America.