anonymous
2007-12-26 19:27:57 UTC
The United States is cast in the role of a doctor during a plague. No matter how hopless the situation may seem, the crisis demands our courage and perseverence. The risks we take are the only hope for avoiding a greater disaster for humanity. Despite the errors we have made in the middle east, the vitriol spit in our direction by the regions inhabitants isn't really aboutr us, its about them. The middle east has grown so inhumane and weak that it craves a "great satan" to explain away its ineptitude. The greatest power on earth will have to do. Indeed the middle east remains the world's sick civilization. Because of our virtuous efforts, Iraq may become the Middle Easts beacon of liberty. Or it may end as another Arab pyre. The Iraqi's, not us, will determine their ultimate fate. Their choices will shape a civilizations future.
Of course there is much more to the world than the struggling Muslim heartlands. Europe is in ther midst of an identity crisis of its own, haunted by a brutal past and insulted by Americas upstart success. The old powers are still far from forgiving us for supplanting them in the stretigic arena - or for our generosity toward them in the last century. Had we only been as cruel as europeans themselves in the wake of the twentieth century's great wars, we would be much better liked. The primary intellectual goal of Western european societies for the past half century has been to prove that the United States is as cruel and corrupt as they themselves have been. When your heritage is genocide, wars of agression, or cowardly surrender, the record of the United States can be hard to bear. The old powers cannot avoid measuring themselves against us, but the disparities they discover are so great that europes moral delinquents cannot resist comforting themselves with lies about our naivete, our purported clumsiness, our violence and our crudity ( without pausing to ask themselves how such pathetic mediocrities could have built the richest, most powerful, most desirable and exemplary society in history). Indeed when it comes to self examination, the heartlands of Europe are simply the middle east lite.
Yet Europe is likely to be good for a number of surprises-surprising not the least to Europeans themselves. With our short historical memory (one American quality Germans welcome), we thoughtlessly accept that, since much of Europe appears to be passive, so it shall remain. But no continent has exported as much misery and slaughter as Europe has done, and chances are better than fair that Europe is simply catching its breath after the calamities it inflicted upon itself in the last century.
We last saw widesperad pacifism just before 1914 and again during that half time break in that great European civil war that lasted until 1945 (or 1991 east of the Elbe).
Europes current round of playing pacifist dress up was enabled by Americas protection during the Cold War. We allowed our European wards to get away with a minimum number of chores. The United States did (and still does) the dirty work, seconded by our direct ancestor Britian. Even NATO merely obscured how little was asked of Europe. For almost a century the work of freedom and global security has been handeled the great Anglolateral alliance born of a struggle against tyranny of Continental European philosophies hatched on the Rhine and Danube. Our struggle continues today - against fanaticism and terror.
It is unlilkely that Europe's present pacifism will last. Indeed, there are many different Europe's. The new Europe in the east understands that freedom has a price and cannot be purchased with appeasment. Southern Europe is undergoing a complex second renaissance. The United Kingdom, for all its grump resentment of the United States, will always align with us in a severe crisis: Our mutual values are far closer than any Briton shares with France or Germany. Anglo-American sparing can be vicious, but outsiders fail to grasp that its a family feud. And the family closes ranks to outsiders. France and Germany are Europes starkest problems (They are also vehemently anti-American). They wish to lead but lack the vision, power and generosity required to build enduring alliances. Germany and France are sick inside, having gobbled up immigrant populations they are unwilling and unable to digest. For all their fabulous critisism of American society ( where their calanders stop at around 1954), th extent of racism and bigotry in Continental Europe rivals that of a long gone American South and threatens to exceed it.
Meanwhile, "Old Europe" is rapidly becoming, truly, old Europe. With aging populations, bankrupt retirment systems, arthritic economies, educational stagnation and punitive taxation, it appears at first glance that the continent is headed for senility, for conditions under which its dwindling youth will neither be able to man the continents already enfeebled militaries nor support the overhang of the elderly.
Dont bet on a weak, pacifist Europe doing nothing as the immigrant time bombs with explode, while demographic pressures stress its outer borders. Behind all the American scolding and empty swagger Europe is uncertain of its future. And afraid. And when Europe is uncertain and afraid, its impoverished immigrants and neighbors had better start worrying.
The most laughable preictions of the the past two centuries have been those forecasting the decline of the West (especially the US). The formal empires may be gone, but the Anglolateral world enjoys power, wealth and freedom without precedent, while continental Euope has never lived so safely or so well as under the Pax Americana. The last half century has been the most prosperous and peacful in European history and Europeans dont want the party to end. But its long past midnight. Europe can no longer afford the lavish social welfare systems it constructed over the decades while America paid the strategic bills without demur.
The trouble with Europe is of course, its dark side. If its racist populations feel sufficiently threatend by its Muslim millions within their divided societies and by terror exported from the islamic heartlands, Europe my respon with a cruelty unimaginable to us today. Afterall, Europe is the continent that mastered ethnic cleansing and genocide after a thousand years of practice. We Americans my find ourselves in the unexpected position of confronting the Europe of tomorrow as we try to restrain its barbarities toward Muslims.
This should be the true American century where we move atlast beyond the poisonous European divisions of the world and help create a genuine"new world order" - although not one based upon the murderous nonsense of the left.
America is the most revolutionary state and culture in history. Now its our turn to export revolution.
Scince the end of the Cold War every conflict in which the United States has been involved has been to some degree a legacy of Europes colonial era - including the liberation of that frankenstein's monster of a country Iraq. We are cleaning up the messes left by Paris, Berlin and even London, while Europeans chide us self-righteously. We need to lead the world away from continental Europes cynical approach to human rights, which consists of theatrically mourning the dead but doing nothing to protect those still alive and threatend. Weakness never saved a human life!
In an age of global pessimism and fear, Americans still believe that change is not only possible, but likely to be good. Weather we wish it or not, we lead humanity. At times we will have to lead with bayonets,but, more often, we will lead through our ideas. If remain wise and just, as well as resolute, ever more of our fellow human beings will follow willingly.
The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and change in history. We, the American people, are humankind's pioneers. Our ancestors cultivated a natural wilderness. Americans of the twenty-first century confront a wilderness of flesh and blood in a world terrified by the virtues that we treasure, from religious tolerance to the rule of law, from the dignity of every man and woman to the rejection of hereditary power. Erupting with freedom, America challenges the world. We expose lies that justified thousands of years of tyrannies, proving that birth need not determine destiny. We demonstrate freedoms potential for all. And those we robbed of authority will never forgive us.
Each day we expand the frontiers of human possibility. Those who insist on limits are our enemies. It is their choice, not ours. The great struggle of the twenty-first century will rage between those, led by America, who believe that men and women have the right to shape their own lives, and those who believe themselves entitled to shape the lives of others. We will prevail, but the rearguard actions fought on behalf of decayed traditions and murderous beliefs will rage beyond our lifetimes.
Without the sacrifices of our forebears, most human beings - perhaps all - would live under tyranny. Without teh Americans of today and our English speaking brethren, dictators would again rise without hindrance. Because of us, freedom an dthe dignity of the common man and woman have become the ideal of a reordered humanity. We have lifted the weight of history from the shoulders of many millions.
And we are far from finished.
Our country is a force for good without precedent. We embody the revolutionary proposition that men and women can govern themselves from below, to the benefit of all, instead of being governed from above, to the benefit of few. Our pride does not rely upon purity of blood or religious monoploy, but uopn what multiple races and creeds have built with sweat and sacrifice. Our ancestors were not children of privilege,but men and women who refused to accept the limits of the lands they left behind. The new Americans who arrive to increase our strength are the spiritual kindred of teh earliest colonists. Old and new, Americans rejected the saftey of submission for a chance to stride upright. And we have learned to live together without hatred, if not without passing rancor. It is an achievement few other lands can claim - and none could claim it but for our example.
Our progress has not been easy. Some of our ancestors fled chains. Othewrs arrived in chains. Some wore chains as they lived upon our soil. Our past has been imperfect. But unlike others, we do not deny our mistakes. We do not embrace history as an excuse for continued failure.
That alone sets us apart from the rest of the world.
When Americans stumble, we get back up. We do not wallow in a self-made mire and call it the will of God or the hand of fate. To err may be human, but to roll up your sleeves and fix what went wrong is American. We bear with us all the faults humanity can manifest. But we do not surrender to those faults. While others cling to past glories, we know that our greatest days still lay ahead.
For all the complaints we must bear about America -the price of our success and the product of human jealousy - only imagine what this world would be like without us. Some may answer that proposition smugly, mocking us from foreign realms of failure. But their children line up by the millions to apply for U.S. Visas. And those who complain about their American birthright rarely leave to live their lives abroad.
All men and women dream. Americans forge their dreams into reality
We are not hated for what we have done to others, but for what we have done for ourselves. The example of our success is humiliating and bitter to all those who cling to traditions our power reveals as inadequate. Even the American capacity for hard work excites the hostility not only of our enemies , but of fair weather allies. Perhaps the cruelest thing European governments have done to their citizens over the past half century has been to destroy the sense that work fullfills a life. An unemployment payment is no substitute for a job, and welfare for the able robs human beings of their dignity, creating moral slaves. Most Americans ,on the other hand, cannot imagine a life without work. We win the lottery, then get back behind the wheel of the delivery truck. Our passion for work and achievement is a tremendous source of our strength.
As an American citizen, I see quiet heroism in the parent who labors at a grinding job, year after year, in order to raise a family, in the common citizen who will never enjoy celebrity or financial wealth, but whose steadiness and moral intergrity make this country go. America has no greater reserve of strength than the honest man or woman who, instead of scheming to beat the system, keeps that sytem running day after day.
Of course few of those Americans see themselves as revolutionaries. Yet we live in the most revolutionary society in history. We upset oppressivetraditions that endured, unchallenged, for millennia. Defiantly, we created new possibilites. The average American with an SSN, a drivers license , and a mortgage is a revolutionary to a degree that reveals Karl Marx and Che Guevara as dilettantes. While revolutionaries elsewhere sought to impose arid philosophies on humankind - at the cost of hundreds of millions of lives - we created a perpetual revolution of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The American Revolution isn't a single event summed up by the date 1776. Our revolution began when the first colonists arrived with their backs turned to an old, limiting world and began to carve a new Jerusalem from virgin timber. Our revolution never stopped - even our Civil War was a revolutionary struggle, the only civil war ever fought to free a never enfranchised, powerless group. We have changed nearly every aspect of the social and economic orders that prevailed fo rcenturies. An dour openess to the new threatens those whose allegiance lies with the barren, dying order - even within our own population. As we pioneer change each day of our lives, those who fear and reject change yearn to stop us, whether we speak of Islamic terrorists in love with a punitive god, French presidents embittered by the loss of status for which their citizens lacked the courage to fight, or the dwindling ranks of domestic bigots.
The distance between us and the rest of the world is growing greater, not lessening.
Consider how much has changed in a half century of American life, in this great age of revolutions, and you begin to understand how threatening our society appears to those who live their lives in thrall to yesterday..