Willie Mays was never great. His .302 batting average means nearly 70 percent of the time he didn’t even get a hit. Never great.
Muhammad Ali might float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, but he lost five fights and let politics distract both himself and his fans. Never great.
Martin Luther King Jr., in his most famous speech said we should be judged for the content of our character and not the color of our skin. Anyone who quotes that now is considered racist. Inspiring racists does not make a man great.
Thomas Edison filed over a thousand patents, many of which changed the world. However, he admitted that he failed far more than he succeeded. Also, many of his inventions are obsolete and have been replaced. Not great.
A child’s first step? Play performance? Drawing? Dance recital? Not great, not even if they were Olympic-level performances.
Bobby Fischer? Isaac Newton? Henry Ford? Julius Caesar? Baron Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen? No one in history has been perfect, except for one carpenter, and leftists hate him. Nope. Pretty much no one and nothing meets today’s totalitarian left standards of absolute perfection.
And America? George Washington, like everyone else in our past, doesn’t meet the standards on the people who live in freedom and prosperity because of his nobility and self-sacrifice. Not great, not enough for those involved with Diversity Studies.
Personally, I prefer to define “great” so that it is challenging but achievable. I enjoy celebrating greatness in my family and in others. That’s because I’m not a cynical leftist who only celebrates government’s perpetual growth and yet complains that the bureaucracy is still too small and growing too slowly.
It seems that the Left equate “great” with flawless or “best”. But “greatness” is a quality and I’m sure we can start with a list of things America has had to offer that other nations simply do not...
things like a freedom of speech and freedom of the press. No state run media here (of any construct greater than PBS/NPR but it does not blindly echo the talking points of whoever is currently in power, it is as liberal as the rest of the establishment media).
things like opportunity to start a business, relocate, choose your own path in life. Guilds and lineage aren’t the tradition of America.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness doesn’t mix well with welfare states, redistribution, and a mantra that all property is theft.
If Mickey Mantle had retired one year earlier, he would've been .302 (instead of .298, which he was).