This guy. He knew the definition of an American.
A Russian told me he could spot an American from down the street in the Soviet erra. Americans walk like they own the place. They don’t look harried or scared. The Russians thought Americans were arrogant and loud; but were secretly envious and such self-assuredness.
An American is someone who knows that Obama isn’t one.
Feeling that your country IS the best country. After all the vast majority of us are descended from immigrants. We came from people for whom some other country WAS NOT CUTTING IT - so they left for a better life. Some for freedom of religion, or thought, or political freedom, or to escape the binds of social class putting them down, or economics. If that “someplace else” had been good enough, they’d have stayed. And no matter WHERE you came from, you can *become* an American. It’s attitude that counts. People come because they want a better life.
A great many of us revere the ideals of the founding fathers - I do not think outsiders understand how dearly we admire the wisdom of the founders, and our cherished constitution and declaration of Independence.
Once upon a time, in the Year 1776, the answer to the question, "What defines them? would have been to advise the questioner to read their Declaration of Independence, and you will know what defines them. At least, that is what the Author of that great document, Thomas Jefferson, said of them when he asserted that the Declaration simply reflected the American mind of that day.
To be an American then was to believe in Creator-endowed, thus unalienable, life, rights, and liberty under what Blackstone defined as Creator's law, known by the Founders as "the laws of nature and of nature's God."
Many American citizens continue to be defined by their devotion to those ideas and to the Constitution of 1787 which structured a new form of self-government for preserving and protecting individual liberty.
On the other hand, as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence have been replaced by counterfeit ideas, new generations may lose sight of the ideas essential to their liberty.
It is up to those who understand the unique ideas upon which American liberty was founded to preserve and restore them to "the American mind" of 2013 and give definition to the question, "What defines them?"
This guy. He knew the definition of an American.