I love the Thanksgiving holiday. It is a reminder to have a thankful heart for the many blessings in life – a loving God and Savior, a wonderful family, the blessings of friendship, the many fine young people it was my privilege to teach over the course of my career, and – of course! – the privilege of being an American.
This year I would like to elaborate just a bit on why I appreciate my country so deeply. A couple of months ago, I was buying some stamps at the post office when a young millennial woman was doing the same at the next window. She made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want stamps with something as ugly as the American flag on it. She seemed quite pleased with herself that she was expressing her negativity toward her own country so openly.
Actually, I felt sorry for her. I wondered what had made her so sour about the USA. My guess is that she went to a college where she was subjected to anti-American ideologies. One of the tragedies of our time is that so many of our schools – particularly at the post-secondary level – have become indoctrination centers pushing a negative view of our country.
This perversion of true education has been going on for a long time. Over 50 years ago, when I was an undergraduate, leftist professors hammered away at our country’s faults – a few of them valid, but many warped and taken out of context. While it is important to take a hard look at things that need to be corrected or improved, there also needs to be an honest recognition of the positive and admirable rather than harp obsessively on the negative. I’d like to supply here a bit of the context that make it so clear to me that the United States of America is a very, very special country for which we citizens should feel proud and grateful.
The ideological left that dominates so many college faculties in our country scour history to find evidence of how often Americans have fallen short of our country’s professed ideals of liberty, justice, and opportunity for all. Indeed, such historical evidence is abundant. The inescapable reality is that most of human history was miserable. Crushing poverty for the masses was the norm. The abomination of slavery was widespread. Governments were typically tyrannical and individual rights suppressed. Opportunities for improvement in one’s social and economic status were often nonexistent. The more deeply you dig into the past, the more ugliness you are going to uncover.
But here is the key point: We aren’t going to live in the past, but in the present with an eye toward the future. And if you look at the trends of history over the past two-plus centuries, you can see massive improvements and abundant cause for optimism.
The founding generation fought against the world’s mightiest military power to gain independence and establish a government that provided unprecedented protection of our rights to life, liberty, and property. The result was an unprecedented explosion of creativity, entrepreneurship, and wealth creation here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” Decade after decade, people flocked to the USA from abroad because this was the Land of Opportunity. And judging by today’s immigration patterns, the USA is still perceived that way. Millions are risking all to get into our country, not to get out of it.
In the U.S., the per capita GDP has multiplied almost 22 times since 1820. Life expectancy is several decades longer than it was just a century ago. In 1923, most houses lacked electricity and indoor plumbing, and yet today, we take those amenities for granted.
Looking at the history of the last six decades, the issues that we students of the 1960s cared about most – poverty, pollution, and racism – we see huge strides of progress. Have we totally eliminated those negatives? Of course not, and given the seemingly endless human capacity to goof up, we probably never will. We should be grateful, though, that we live in a country where citizens transcend the past and progress is the norm – a country where the people show the capacity and commitment to reducing injustices and improving upon past shortcomings.
One of the most vexing issues that causes some Americans to criticize our country is war. People on the progressive left and the populist right lambaste the U.S. as a latter-day empire. That viewpoint is, to put it bluntly, grotesquely warped. Far from waging war to conquer foreign lands or install puppet governments, our military forces have, at the cost of great sacrifices, liberated literally millions of people from horrible tyrants. Yes, of course we have made mistakes (e.g., a no-win policy in Vietnam and futile nation-building attempts in Iraq and Afghanistan). Imagine, though, how much grimmer, poorer, and bleaker the world would be today if not American military might.
I would urge any American, but particularly young Americans who think that our country is nothing to be proud of, to travel abroad and see more of the world. Then they may learn why millions still flock to our shores. Is the USA perfect? Nobody would claim that it is. But is it a unique, special, and blessed country? Definitely, yes. And I am both thankful for it and proud of it.
Happy Thanksgiving to all Americans wherever you are this Thursday.
