john manning

Great America
by Larry Robinson
October 14, 2003, CommonDreams.org
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1014-12.htm

America is a great country; not that we
don’t have our share of problems. We do. In
fact our problems are great also. But the
source of our greatness is greatly
misunderstood.

Are we great because we can kick butt?
Because our military machine - with a
budget equal to that of the rest of the
world combined - can successfully invade
and conquer any third world nation we choose?

Are we great because we are capable of
consuming the lion’s share of the world’s
resources? Because we have more
billionaires than any other country?
Because we can choose among 300 television
stations or buy anything we want at WalMart?

I don’t think so. America’s greatness
derives from its people and its ideas. We
are great because of people like Tom Paine
and his vision of a self-governing populace
free from the tyranny of kings,
corporations and churches; people like
Thomas Jefferson who insisted on a Bill of
Rights in our Constitution to ensure those
freedoms we too often take for granted -
those very freedoms which our President and
Attorney General now tell us we must
surrender for our own safety.

We are great because of people like
Sojourner Truth, Susan B, Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and countless others
who fought for universal suffrage; people
like Frederick Douglass, John Brown,
Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks and Martin
Luther King Jr. who held an enduring vision
of the worth and dignity of all people.

We are great because of people like Dorothy
Day, Bill Haywood, Phillip Randolph, John
L. Lewis, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and
the thousands of union organizers who
fought for and gave us the forty-hour work
week, an end to child labor, workers health
and safety laws, the minimum wage and many
other rights we now take for granted. These
rights were not granted by benevolent
corporations or by an altruistic
government, but by the perseverance,
suffering and deaths of so many forgotten
working men and women.

We are great because of the hard work and
risk-taking of generations of family
farmers; because of the ingenuity and
enterprise of small business owners and
entrepreneurs; because of the blood, sweat
and tears of millions of immigrants working
for a better life. The wealth of this
nation, which is being is now being
transferred - at an unprecedented rate -
from the middle and working classes to the
very wealthiest, derives ultimately from
our abundant natural resources and from our
own hard work.

We are great because of our faith in both
individual ability and our collective
capacity to solve our common problems and
to work for the common good. We are great
because of a long tradition of voluntary
public service. Throughout this country, in
every community there are those who give
their time to school boards or planning
commissions, to homeless shelters or
services for the disadvantaged, to
environmental causes or local arts
councils. They give their time and money
out of a commitment to a better world, not
because they expect some private gain.

We are great because of our commitment to
free education for all children; because of
our tradition of free public libraries. We
are willing to tax ourselves, even if we
have no school-age children ourselves, to
support the community good.

We are great because of our willingness to
welcome newcomers who bring a vitality and
enlivening richness to our cultural mix;
because of our tolerance for differences
and our openness to new ideas; because of
our willingness to cooperate and our
reluctance to take orders; because of our
mistrust of authority, whether sacred or
secular; because of our sense of fair play
and our hatred of injustice and oppression.

These are real American values - even
though we often fall short in practice -
the spiritual current which has run through
us to make a beacon of hope for the world.

But all things have a shadow. Indeed, the
closer to the light an object is, the
greater the shadow it casts. The shadow
side of freedom, for instance, is license -
the false belief that we are not subject to
the consequences of our actions. Simply
doing whatever you want whenever you want
is a form of addiction, not true freedom.
Forgetting that every right implies a
responsibility, we can confuse rights with
entitlement. In this we are diminished.

We are diminished by the use of military
power to impose our will on other nations;
by military and financial support for
regimes which oppress and brutalize their
own people; by overt and covert actions of
our government to overthrow democratically
elected governments in order to support
commercial interests; by our failure to
accord citizens of other countries the
human rights we expect for ourselves.

We are diminished by the widening gap
between the haves and the have-nots; by our
tolerance of homelessness and unemployment;
by the wholesale dismantling of our social
safety net and of our public school system;
by our growing private wealth at the
expense of our commonwealth; by our
commitment to getting more than we give; by
our selfishness and our greed.

We are diminished by our apathy in the face
of the corporate takeover of our political
process and of our entire culture; by our
willingness to overlook the exploitation of
workers in third world countries so that we
can buy cheaper consumer goods; by our
failure to protest the hijacking of the
American dream.

We are diminished by our fear of “the
other”; by our intolerance for dissent or
difference; by our retreat from community
into our own isolated and gated worlds; by
our passive acceptance of predigested
opinions and our reluctance to question
what we are fed by the corporate media.

We are diminished by every hungry child
anywhere on earth; by every family who
lacks adequate health care; by the
continued existence of slavery; by every
**** of a woman and every act of racial
intolerance or violence; by the pollution
of our air and waters; by our collusion in
the destruction of this planet.

More than anything else, we are diminished
by pride. Consider the bumper stickers
“Proud To Be An American.” Some people
have, indeed, worked hard to become
Americans. But the rest of us didn’t do
anything to become Americans; we simply had
the great good fortune to be born here. Can
you imagine someone saying “I’m so proud
that I won the lottery”?

We have too often confused the effects of
greatness with its causes and the gifts of
fate with just desserts. Pride is the
absence of gratitude. Christianity, with
good reason, has long considered pride to
be the first of the seven deadly sins. In
ancient Greece, the word for pride was
hubris, which was associated with a
dangerous arrogance and was, inevitably
followed by nemesis, the great downfall.

Most, though by no means all, Americans
have much to be grateful for. Yet our
unquestioning assumption of privilege is
arguably the greatest threat to our
national security and well-being because it
blinds us to our collusion in perpetuating
the injustices which breed hatred,
desperation and, ultimately, terrorism.

America’s true greatness is still to be
realized. We are living in a time where
greed is glorified and power is worshipped
as a god. Hubris temporarily reigns
triumphant, but its triumph never lasts.
More than at any other time in our history
we are being called to embody those
qualities which make us great so that this
nation “of the people, by the people and
for the people shall not perish from this
earth.”

Larry Robinson is a former mayor and
current city council member of Sebastopol,
California He can be reached at Lrob@pon.net

scottk

WOW!!!!

John - This has to be the first time in ARM that I've ever seen you post
something that actually makes sense!

ScottK

goner

It must have been a mistake.

cheers,
Don Marchant
Dangerous1.com

Think global, act loco