I was born in England yet I regard myself as an American and always have. What does that mean?
My mum once asked me if I was going to become an American and whether I still felt British. I simply asked her, "If I ask you what does it mean to be British, what would you say?" she couldn't come up with an answer. Neither can I. But if you ask me what does it mean to be an American I can answer straight away. It means that I hold the following to be self evident truths. That all men are born equal. That they are endowed by their creator with unalienable rights. That among these rights are...
It does not mean that I was born on some particular continent of the Earth, it has nothing to do with my blood line, it has nothing to do with my upbringing. All who feel empathy with the above statement of concepts are Americans!
It feels difficult to talk about these issues because of the passion which Americans feel for these ideals. What does a mere immigrant upstart know about the sacrifices made by our forefathers, our boys facedown in the battlefields of..., etc.
The problem is the complete reversal of roles in the above. Immigrants have usually personally suffered and sacrificed to get to America, whereas, Americans are spouting on about ancestors, their bloodline and the fact that they had the dumb luck to be born here!
They can all spout the creed but not all live by it. So its come to this. We have a government, and a system of education producing dumb citizens to support it, which wraps itself in the trappings of the republican ideals, the shining city on the hill, and yet is arguably worse than some of the regimes we immigrants fled!
To which the dumb luck American response is "Well, if you don't like it, go back where you came from." Well, where I'm coming from is I want to be a part of a nation where we all hold the following to be self evident... Excuse me for putting everything on the line to get to a place which claims to uphold those ideals and welcomes all those who support it. Send me your downtrodden and yearning to be free and all that.
America, by accident of time and place and ideas at its creation, was a unique experiment and a beacon to the world. I fear that the experiment died a long time ago and the light is the flickering embers of what was once great and is no more.
How do us "real" Americans restore this ideal and get a nation back on course? Or if it truly has perished, how do we create a new one and prevent its loss?
This notion of a Conceptual America has raised the hackles of a number of prominent commentators of the right and left. Peter Brimelow, a naturalised American, ie an immigrant from Britain, is one of the foremost right-wing immigrant bashers, a pull the ladder up, I'm all right Jack, pusher of numbers which show the pernicious problem of the welfare state, not the problem of immigration.
Honest to God, in coming to America the last thing I thought about was what the unemployment benefits and health insurance was like, yet this seems to be the first "benefit" which Americans see these worthless immigrants coming over here to steal!
When I came here I wanted a government which didn't steal the fruits of my labour through taxation, left me alone, and from which in return I expected nothing. In otherwords, nothing less than a nation devoid of the evils listed in the Declaration of Independence, a nation whose government is Constitutionally shackled from oppressing me. And they call me an unpatriotic immigrant for criticising the American Government!
And yet is anything I've said that different from what this man said?
And didn't he turn out to be a prime example of saying one things while doing another! Such a dissapointment but at least he didn't sucker me in. As I get older I no longer participate in the shell game.