American Greatness

I saw, and responded to, a Facebook post a couple weeks back, in which one of my friends asked “What makes America great?” I wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that the first answer posted was “Nothing.” Needless to say, I didn’t agree with that assessment, and I gave my own answer. As we celebrate the 241st birthday of the greatest nation that has ever existed on the face of the Earth, I decided to expand a bit on the ideas I mentioned in my answer to my friend’s question.
What makes America great, in this American’s opinion, is the ideal on which it was founded—the ideal that all people are created equal and that they have rights that no person can take away. Among these, to quote Jefferson, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, as soon as I say that, some will start throwing the BS flag, pointing out things such as the fact that the man who wrote those words owned other human beings as property, the fact that slavery existed at all, the fact that there are people who even today do not feel that the American ideal belongs to them, or don’t even consider themselves American at all due to how people have been treated. But, I believe that that argument exposes a flaw, and that when we acknowledge that flaw, that is in itself part of America’s greatness.
The Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were both written primarily by men who owned slaves. Nobody disputes that. They wrote “all men are created equal” on one hand, and wrote that “such persons” as the euphemism was understood at the time, only counted as three-fifths of a person. Nobody disputes that. What I dispute, however, is the notion that these flaws somehow make the whole thing invalid—just today, someone told me that everything America stands for is bullshit because of stolen land, barbaric treatment of natives, slavery, racism, and so on. I respectfully disagree with that analysis.
The ideals that I’ve already mentioned were written by people who did not themselves come anywhere near close to living up to them. The beautiful thing about it is the fact that THEY KNEW THEY DID NOT LIVE UP TO THEIR IDEALS. Jefferson and Madison both knew full well that they were, for wont of a better word, hypocrites for saying one thing while living out the exact opposite. Having read their writings, I can say for certain that they both struggled with the dichotomy of slavery existing in a country that was built on liberty. Jefferson openly hoped and prayed that, some day, America would come to a point where she could do something about slavery and other issues of inequality. Madison expressed similar sentiments. They knew they had a few centuries’ worth of work ahead of them in order to live up to the ideals of our founding documents. They knew they would not see the result, which Dr. King referred to as the Promised Land, in their lifetimes, or even in their children’s lifetimes, but at least they were able to start the ball rolling by putting the ideals on paper as something to work towards.
Our founders knew that even the things they put on paper weren’t going to be enough to get things going along the lines of living up to our ideals of freedom, and the beautiful thing is that, having anticipated that, they put in place a method to make changes to our Constitution so that, when we were ready to address our problems, we could do so. In the 1860s, after decades of sectional arguments, philosophical debates, and four years of Civil War, we as a society decided that the time had come to deal with the single biggest discrepancy in our values system. So, our cultural ancestors used that change process to make slavery illegal. They then used the same system a couple years later to make sure freed slaves were counted as full-fledged citizens of our republic, and then to make sure they and their descendants had the right to vote alongside those of us who had always been free.
Even that didn’t get the job done, though. For the next one-hundred years, people found ways to get around those constitutional requirements and continue to deprive people of their rights. Civil rights laws in the 1950s and 60s, and beyond, have worked to rectify those problems. Even today, we still have major issues living up to “all men are created equal” or perhaps we should today say “all persons are created equal.” There are large parts of our society who feel that our ideals are not meant for them because of their ancestry. There are people who believe that government forces are actively trying to exterminate them because of their ethnic background. There are people who feel that our justice system is specifically rigged to hold them down and even to skirt around the prohibition on slavery. These are problems that still need to be worked out before we achieve Mr. Jefferson’s ideal and Dr. King’s Promised Land.
But the beauty, and the greatness, of our country is that we know we have the tools to with which to solve those problems. Look at how far we’ve come in 241 years. It is no longer legal for Americans to own other people as property. Anybody who is born on our soil is automatically welcomed as a full-fledged citizen, even those who were born here to parents who were in violation of our laws by being on our soil. The tools with which one can educate themselves and rise to personal greatness are there for everyone—certainly, there are those who have a harder time attaining them than others do, but that is something for us to work on. We live in a society in which we know that, when we put our collective minds to it, we can accomplish something as spectacular as landing on the Moon. We know we live in a society where a child of mixed race, from a broken family, raised by a single mother after his father went back to his native country, can grow up and get elected President of the United States…twice. I think Messer’s. Jefferson and Madison would have been really proud to know that.
What makes us great is that we can learn from the mistakes of our past and work to make sure we do not repeat them. Our only hindrance is when we allow ourselves to be held back by our past. My friend was 100% correct when he said that America was built on the backs of slaves, on stolen land. We cannot deny the fact that our cultural ancestors had their faults, and did some things that were downright evil. But we also cannot deny the ideals they gave us. They gave us the ideal that all persons are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable human rights, and that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The fact that those ideals were coined by flawed people does not invalidate the ideals themselves.
What we need to do if we want to make ourselves and our country even greater is to make those ideals OUR ideals. We have to stand up and say “Okay, we acknowledge the fact that we have dark things in our history. We cannot change that. However, we can grow from it.” If we adopt these ideals as our ideals, we can look at each other and realize that the circumstances of our coming to be in this place at this point in time are not really relevant. It doesn’t matter if we’re first-generation Americans, or if our ancestors have been here since the beginning. It doesn’t matter if we come from people who came here from Europe looking to escape religious or economic persecution. It doesn’t matter if we come from people who came here looking to make a better life in a new land. It doesn’t matter if we come from people who were already here and who had their lands taken from them by force by outsiders. It doesn’t matter if we come from people who were brought here in chains in the belly of a slave galleon.
What matters is that WE are HERE, NOW. What matters is that we take that ideal—that we are all created equal and have unalienable rights—and work to make a better future in which we come even closer to meeting that ideal than we ever have before. What matters is that we stop trying to define ourselves and each other based on ethnicity, ancestry, skin color or any other method. What makes us great is that, regardless of all else, we are all AMERICANS. If we define ourselves that way, and determine to make life better for all Americans, then we all win. We have done it before. We can continue to do it. That is what makes America great, and what will make us even greater in the future than we already are. It does not matter that our president is an asshole. It does not matter that we have all the negative stuff in our past that I have discussed. It does not matter that not everybody is here came here willingly. What matters is that we are all here, and all in this together. That is what makes America great.