What is America? A country, an idea or both?

I heard someone remark this week that Barack Obama did not share the values of the United States because he didn’t grow up here. While initially that sounded plausible, the more I thought about it, the more I disagreed with it. The truth of the matter is that growing up in the United States is no guarantee of sharing values with America. A few examples might be Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Michael Moore, the late Howard Zinn and many others.

The thing that President Obama and so many on the left do not understand is that the United States is indeed a unique animal. Not only is it a country, but it’s also an idea. People around the world don’t just dream of coming to America, they dream of becoming Americans. Many have and continue to risk their lives to do so. It’s one thing to risk your life escaping the Soviet Union, Communist China or even Communist Cuba. Those people were or are running from something, trying to go anywhere else. It’s another thing altogether to risk one’s life to come to a place… And that place is more often than not, America.

America is somewhat unique in the history of mankind – or at least in the last 2,000 years. People may dream of moving to Paris for the romance and the food, but they don’t dream of becoming a Frenchman. Many Hong Kong Chinese moved to Canada before the Communists took over, but they weren’t expecting to become Canadian. Someone might move to Singapore for its economic opportunities, but they don’t expect to become Singaporean. Throughout history one has examples of people choosing to move to a different locale to take advantage of economic opportunities or various freedoms. The British Empire offered certain advantages but few Indians or South Africans or Egyptians expected to move to Britain and become British. While they may have been British subjects, they were not actually British. One almost has to go back to the Roman Empire to find something similar to the idea of America. There, outsiders not only dreamed of living in Rome, they also dreamed of becoming Roman… and could do so. The idea of becoming a Roman citizen actually meant something beyond just living in the Empire or being subject to its laws.

Those who insist that there is no such thing as “American exceptionalism” just don’t “get” America. It is indeed a unique country, founded on principals that only exist in very few other places on the globe.

The key to America’s success has been assimilation, and becoming part of everything that sets up apart from most other nations. Unfortunately, we’ve had several decades of immigrant groups that insist on transplanting their home cultures here while basking in the freedoms and benefits paid for by others.

This is why I strongly suspect that Skippy isn’t an American. He just doesn’t get what makes us different, preferring to see us as just another country on the map. And this is why he’s lost the respect of global leaders everywhere, who DO look to America still as a beacon of freedom.

Co-authoring “Pursuing Liberty: America Through the Eyes of the Newly Free” has blessed me with working with new Americans who have fled tyranny, sometimes at great risk, just to have a slimmest shot at the liberty that many of us native born take for granted. When you see this magnificent country through the eyes of the oppressed, it is a humbling experience.

What am I thankful for? Being an American is at the top of the list. And I’m thankful that we haven’t yet lost the country to government overreach, but we’re getting pretty damn close.

And yes. It IS up to us to stop it. And pass it along to future American generations, repaying the debt that we owe to those who sacrificed to bestow liberty upon us.

God bless America and my FR fellow patriots on this day!

“The truth of the matter is that growing up in the United States is no guarantee of sharing values with America.” “The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened.”
– Norman Thomas, American socialist

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and he carries his banners openly against the city. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears no traitor; he speaks in the accents familiar to his victim, and he wears their face and their garments and he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of a city; he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to be feared. The traitor is the plague.”
- Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman Orator - 106-43 B.C.

After years of failed attempts to get the Communist Party - http://www.cpusa.org/ - or Socialist Party - http://www.sp-usa.org/ off the ground in America, leadership in the movement adopted a different, much more successful strategy.

Unable to compete openly with Americas two powerful political party’s nationally on the merit of communist and socialist principles and values, leaders in the movement decided to work from within one of the two parties.

As both communism and socialism prey on the proletariat (working class) for political power, the old “party of the people” seemed like the best party to work within.

The Democratic Socialists of America http://www.dsausa.org/dsa.html The Democratic Socialists of America was formed as a spin-off of the Socialist Party USA for the stated purpose of working from inside the Democrat Party through its legislative arm, the Progressive Congressional Caucus. The Progressive Congressional Caucus, which now has more than sixty members seated in congress, all of whom played a significant roll in causing the current financial crisis.
PROGRESSIVE CAUCUS (DEMOCRATIC) (PC-D)http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6497 Through incremental victories from within the power structure of the Democrat Party, over an extended period, the Communist Party and Socialist Party agenda would be advanced below the radar of the average American voter, many of whom still vote Democrat just because their parents did, or because their fellow union employees do.

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