American Exceptionalism

We are a nation of immigrants. Legal, illegal, temporary, undocumented, by whatever category we chose to pigeonhole ourselves or others, we all came from somewhere. Even the "native" Americans came from somewhere else, and did not appear by Ecclesiastical fiat, even though it would seem so, if you were to depend on statements in recently published history textbooks. .


When America began to populate in the 17th century (those are the 1600's for those in public school), the people that came here from anywhere shared one great exceptionalism; they were willing to uproot themselves and their families from everything they had known and move to a place of which they knew little. The one thing they did know is that the place to which they were going promised nothing except the freedom to fail or succeed based on terms dictated only by God and the pilgrim himself. This alone was enough to impel the immigrant to risk it all in order to gain the opportunity to escape the oppression of national leaders who viewed the people as subjects and not as citizens.

These people, soon after arriving in this land, began to shed their identities as immigrants and started thinking of themselves as Americans. They fought hard against the forces of nature and the vestiges of control still sought by the nations from which they had come until they formed their own independent nation in 1776. As the dust of independence settled exceptional people from all over the world continued to come and build the greatest and most powerful nation the world has ever known. All this was achieved while the people fought off the natural tendency of bureaucracies to grow like an untreated cancer.

The special something that made Americans American was that tendency to look inside for what it takes to succeed. It would be hard to imagine a farmer in 1840 asking the government to pay him not to plant a crop. Likewise, any government agent who set foot on a farmers property to demand that he grow less (or more) of something would be met with disdain, if not a shotgun. We decided what we would do and how we would do it, and we would reap the benifits or pay the costs that resulted from our efforts.

Somewhere along the line, beginning in the early 20th century (public schoolers, count up from the aformentioned 17th) and acceleratiing like an avalanche, burying everything in its path, what made Americans exceptional begain to ebb and die. I would like to blame Woodrow Wilson and his romance with industrial Fascism, or Franklin Roosevelt and his economic Socialism, or especially Barack Obama and his Congressional accomplices for their utopian vision of combined Socialism/Fascism, but I can't. The hard and cold fact is that we are no longer exceptional as a people. We have accepted the leadership of unrealistic utopian dreamers and bureaucrats as though they had any idea what they were talking about. We accept it because we no longer bother to learn what is true. We don't even accept the concept of truth anymore.

The hard, cold fact is that America is declining. Our children will suffer the consequences that will come as the result of the decisions of what we can only euphamistically refers as 'leaders', and the ultimate responsibilty will fall to we the people who put them in office and have kept them in office. We were given a mighty and wonderful gift by generations of people who fought and died to create and preserve it, and we squandered it. I look around at the young adults of today, blissfully ignorant of the past, patiently waiting like lobsters in the pot waiting for the end to come.