These annoying countdown clocks the cable TV networks use to tell us how a lot time stays earlier than a presidential deal with or one thing else considered worthy of our consideration may be helpful as America begins the countdown to the 250th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence.
A query that may be useful for dialogue throughout our more and more divided occasions may be: “What does it imply to be an American”? Is it outlined within the lyric of the Lee Greenwood tune “I’m proud to be an American the place at the very least I do know I’m free”? That doesn’t totally reply the query: what’s an American and much more, what’s America?
Schoolchildren as soon as studied such issues earlier than American historical past was re-written in lots of public colleges and universities to suit a progressive narrative. They realized that the nation was named for the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, whose declare to fame was the invention that the land he was exploring, the New World, was not part of Asia, however a separate continent. German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller used Vespucci’s first identify, whose Latin model was “Americus,” to label the long run United States on a map he drew in 1507. The identify “America” was rapidly and universally accepted. At the moment we would have had a naming contest.
That also doesn’t reply the query as to what’s America and who’re People? Frank Sinatra gave his reply in a tune titled “The Home I Stay In.” Within the run-up to singing it, Sinatra’s narration consists of: “Solely in America might all that’s occurred to me, occur to a man like me. Wherever else I may need wound up digging coal.”
That will get near answering the questions. America is a land of alternative for many who can see it and seize it. In case you can’t make it right here, you might be unlikely to do as nicely anyplace else. America can also be about overcoming obstacles. Their tales used to encourage individuals who had a nasty begin in life earlier than we accepted the false notion that we’re entitled to what others personal and don’t should work for it.
America is an thought in a seamless quest for the best. When we’ve got did not stay as much as the Declaration and our constitutional ideas, we don’t hand over. We attempt to make issues proper as a result of we’ve got a regular – a basis – that defines what is correct. “We maintain these truths to be self-evident.” Such truths (“endowed by our Creator with sure unalienable rights”) helped us overcome the evil scourge of slavery and the denial of civil rights to those that descended from the enslaved. What different nation gives such alternatives and hope?
Freedom shouldn’t be “simply one other phrase for nothing left to lose,” as Janis Joplin sang. However with freedom comes duty, together with the expectation will probably be renewed by every succeeding era. As Ronald Reagan accurately said: “Freedom is rarely a couple of era away from extinction. We didn’t move it to our kids within the bloodstream. It should be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the identical, or someday we are going to spend our sundown years telling our kids and our kids’s youngsters what it was as soon as like in the US the place males have been free.”
Let’s have a dialog throughout these subsequent three hundred and sixty five days about what it means to be an American and what we are going to do to resume America for the subsequent era whereas preserving it for the present ones.
In reply to the questions on America and People, it’s onerous to enhance on the motto inscribed on the Nice Seal of the US – E pluribus unum, “from many, one.” Let the countdown start.
Readers might e-mail Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Search for Cal Thomas’ newest guide “A Watchman within the Evening: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).
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