Excellent read! What Makes America Great by Dinesh DSouza Excerpt: Having grown up in a different society-in my case, Mumbai, India-I am able to identify aspects of America that are invisible to people who have always lived here. As a person of color, I am competent to address such questions as what it is like to be a nonwhite person in America, what this country owes its minority citizens, and whether immigrants can expect to be granted full membership in this society. While I take seriously the issues raised by the critics of America, I have also developed an understanding of what makes America great, and I have seen the greatness of America reflected in my life. Unlike many of Americas homegrown dissidents, I am also acutely conscious of the daily blessings that I enjoy in America. Here, then, is my list of what makes America great. Americas Good Life America provides an amazingly good life for the ordinary guy. Rich people live well everywhere, but what distinguishes America is that it provides a remarkably high standard of living for the common man. A country is not judged by how it treats its most affluent citizens but by how it treats the average citizen. In much of the world today, the average citizen has a very hard life. In the Third World, people are struggling for their basic existence. It is not that they dont work hard. On the contrary, they labor incessantly and endure hardships that are almost unimaginable to people in America. In the villages of Asia and Africa, for example, a common sight is a farmer beating a pickaxe into the ground, women wobbling under heavy loads, children carrying stones. These people are performing arduous labor, but they are getting nowhere. The best they can hope for is to survive for another day. Their clothes are tattered, their teeth are rotten, and disease and death constantly loom over the horizon. For most poor people on the planet, life is characterized by squalor, indignity, and brevity. Even middle-class people in the underdeveloped world endure hardships that make everyday life a strain. One problem is that the basic infrastructure of the Third World is abysmal: The roads are not properly paved, the water is not safe to drink, pollution in the cities has reached hazardous levels, public transportation is overcrowded and unreliable, and there is a two-year waiting period to get a telephone. The poorly paid government officials are inevitably corrupt, which means that you must pay bribes to get things done. Most important, prospects for the childrens future are dim. In America, the immigrant immediately recognizes that things are different. The newcomer who sees America for the first time typically experiences emotions that alternate between wonder and delight. Here is a country where everything works: The roads are clean and paper-smooth; the highway signs are clear and accurate; the public toilets function properly; when you pick up the telephone, you get a dial tone; you can even buy things from the store and then take them back. For the Third World visitor, the American supermarket is a thing to behold: endless aisles of every imaginable product, 50 different types of cereal, and multiple flavors of ice cream. The place is full of countless unappreciated inventions: quilted toilet paper, fabric softener, cordless telephones, disposable diapers, roll-on luggage, deodorant. Some countries, even today, lack these conveniences. Critics of America complain about the scandal of persistent poverty in a nation of plenty, but the immigrant cannot help noticing that the United States is a country where the poor live comparatively well. This fact was dramatized in the 1980s when CBS television broadcast People Like Us, which was intended to show the miseries of the poor during an American recession. The Soviet Union also broadcast the documentary, probably with a view to embarrassing the Reagan Administration. But by the testimony of former Soviet leaders, it had the opposite effect. Ordinary people across the Soviet Union saw that the poorest Americans have television sets and microwave ovens and cars. They arrived at the same perception of America as a friend of mine from Mumbai who has been trying unsuccessfully to move to the United States for nearly a decade. Finally, I asked him, Why are you so eager to come to America? His reply: Because I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat. ........ The Pursuit of Happiness America offers more opportunity and social mobility than any other country. In much of the world, even today, if your father is a bricklayer, you become a bricklayer. Most societies offer limited opportunities for and little chance of true social mobility. Even in Europe, social mobility is relatively restricted. When you meet a rich person, chances are that person comes from a wealthy family. This is not to say that ordinary citizens cannot rise up and become successful in France and Germany, but such cases are atypical. Much more typical is the condescending attitude of the European old rich toward the self-made person, who is viewed as a bit of a vulgar interloper. In Europe, as in the rest of the world, the preferred path to wealth is through inheritance. Not so in America. Success stories of people who have risen up from nothing are so common that they are unremarkable. Nobody bothers to notice that in the same family, one brother is a gas station attendant and the other is a vice president at Oracle. Old money carries no prestige in America-it is as likely to mean that a grandparent was a bootlegger or a robber baron. Rather, as the best-selling book The Millionaire Next Door documents, more than 80 percent of American millionaires are self-made. Indeed, America is the only country that has created a population of self-made tycoons. More than 50 percent of the Americans on the Forbes 400 rich list got there through their own efforts. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are Iranian and who grew up in Paris, have started a company like eBay. Only in America could Vinod Khosla, the son of an Indian army officer, become a leading venture capitalist, a shaper of the technology industry, and a billionaire to boot. The critics complain that equal opportunity is a myth in America, but there is more opportunity in this country than anywhere else in the world. European countries may have better mass transit systems and more comprehensive health care coverage, but nowhere does the ordinary citizen have a better chance to climb up the ladder and to achieve success than in the United States. ........ Religious Liberty America has found a solution to religious and ethnic conflict. In many countries today, people from different faiths or tribes are engaged in bloody conflict: Serbs and Croatians, Sikhs and Hindus, Hindus and Muslims, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, Jews and Palestinians, Hutu and Tutsi-the list of religious and ethnic combatants goes on and on. Even in countries where ethnic or religious differences do not lead to extreme violence, there is generally no framework for people to coexist harmoniously. In France and Germany, for example, nonwhite immigrants have proved largely indigestible. They form an alien underclass within Europe, and Europeans seem divided about whether to subjugate them or to expel them. One option that is not available to the nonwhite immigrants is to become full citizens. They cannot become French or become German because being French and German is a function of blood and birth. You become French by having French parents. In America, things are different. Consider the example of New York City. It is a tumultuous place, teeming with diversity. New York has black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native. I have noticed two striking things about these people. They are energetic, hard-working, opportunistic: They want to succeed and believe there is a good chance they can. Second, for all their profound differences, they manage somehow to get along. This raises a question about New York and about America: How does it manage both to reconcile such fantastic ethnic and religious and socioeconomic diversity and give hope and inspiration to so many people from all over the world? The credit, I believe, goes largely to the American Founders. The Founders were all too familiar with the history of the religious wars in Europe, specifically their legacy of havoc and destruction. They were determined to avoid that bloodshed in the New World. Not that the Founders were anti-religion. On the contrary, they were religious men (some Deist, some orthodox Christian) who insisted that political legitimacy and rights derive from God. The Declaration of Independence, for instance, insists that the source of our rights is our Creator. It is because rights come from God, and not us, that they are inalienable. [click on link to read entire article.] heritage.org/research/reports/2006/02/whats-great-about-america
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:12:52 +0000
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