Causes me to remember:
I had just read a short article about Europeans and their collective opinion of us (US). I was struck by this line:
“...[Europeans regard Americans as] upstarts who have little history, experience or wisdom...”
Which led me to write the following:
All my time in Europe (mostly Germany) I came up against this assumption. What they entirely failed to realize, and often failed to recognize as true even after I told them, was that we are them.
+ We are that part of them that had the ambition to pack what we could carry, leave our homes in Bavaria and Sachsen-Anhalt and Alsace-Lorraine and Calabria and Norway and a myriad others, to make a new life in the New World, before and after its incorporation as a nation.
+ We are the second sons of the ruling houses who, disinherited by primogeniture and/or bankruptcy, left the palaces, manors and stately homes to seek our fortunes in honest labor.
+ We are the political and religious dissidents, and not a few rascals and cads, who were transported against our will to the American Colonies before the British discovered Australia.
Our history is theirs, tempered by the perspective of distance....
Our experience is theirs, modified, enlarged, and improved by our own....
Our wisdom is theirs, corrected by practical application to fresh circumstance....
They would do well to follow our example; this would become obvious if they would drop their pride long enough to witness how, in three hundred years (give or take), we have surpassed what they accomplished in three thousand.
Well said Sir!
We are, in fact, the children of the best of them.
And thanks for your service there.. Ex GI :-)
Very well said.
Perfect!