Wow.What is unique about the US – and indispensable to the understanding of it – is that it is a country of the displaced and dispossessed: a nation which invented itself for the very purpose of permitting people to reinvent themselves, to take their fate into their own hands, to be liberated from the persecution and the paternalism of the old cultures they had left behind. Almost every American either is himself, or is descended from, someone who made a conscious decision to pull up his roots and take his chances in a land he had almost certainly never seen and which, until quite recently, offered no protection or security if the gamble failed.
And what a terrifying gamble it was: I had not realised until I visited the Ellis Island Museum that one of the conditions of entry to the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries was that the immigrant did not have a pre-arranged job. This was presumably to ensure that cheap labour gangs could not be imported to undercut indigenous workers. But the effect was that everyone who came to America had to be willing to take the risk of starting with nothing and making his own way in the world.
Can you imagine what the character (and the desperation) of these people must have been? To travel 3,000 miles in steerage, with all your worldly possessions on your back, to an unknown future – and all to escape from the demonic power of a state which had oppressed or demeaned or maltreated you? Not only is hatred and suspicion of over-powerful government embedded in the consciousness of ordinary Americans, it is inscribed in the Constitution, which provides, probably more than any document in human history, a literal embodiment of political values and a bond between disparate people which gives them a sense of national identity.
Read Janet Daily's full article here.
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3 comments:
Which may be why we're the only country where some jackass can get all kinds of media attention for threatening national security and inciting violence without going to jail. Hey, I wonder if I could get a seat on the space shuttle if I threaten to burn a holy book?
However, let us not forget the Puritans, who came to this country to spread intolerance of anything that wasn't exactly like them. We're descended from them, too.
My grandfather came through Eliis Island. He worked in a steel mill for 12 years before he could afford to send for his wife and children. Two kids died. Grandmother and the surviving son were stuck for four weeks in detention at Ellis because the son was sick when he got here, and they were threatening to send them back to Scotland.
A few years later, the steel mill was infiltrated by the Klu Klux Klan. They asked (threatened, cajoled) my grandfather to join. He told them that anyone who had to hide behind sheets to stand up for what they believed in were cowards.
Mom was born here. That son was a distinguished officer in WWII. Grandpa died before I was born, but my mom tells me we would have gotten on famously.
One side of the family came here directly aboard the Mayflower; the survivor of the first winter here went onto have 10 kids (yowza!).
Both sides of the family have known privation, hard work, working to live...and some parts of it learned and achieved the better life. Sadly, I wasn't part of the 'better life' section of the tree LOL.
Too easily we forget, nowadays, what made this country great. We need to be reminded, before it is diluted by multiculturalism, political correctness, and the creeping cancer of socialism.
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