Good ol American Values

Though it is my home, I am admittedly not a big cheerleader for the United States and its politics. However, I am a huge history aficionado. As an American, I learned little about history besides anything that directly related to my American experience. This is regrettable because I feel the history of other parts off the world is much more exciting and intriguing. Nevertheless, I always like to learn the little known facts and the things that were left out or forgotten from my childhood history lessons.

The History Channel is home to a new series called "America: The Story of Us". The first episode was 2 hours long and covered the period from Jamestown until the Revolutionary War. I learned many facts by watching this, which was the goal. More profound to me was the realization that we are not what we claim to be anymore. We have truly lost the American spirit that we preach around the world.

Cooperation and Respect
The residents of Jamestown made a treacherous journey in 1610 across the ocean that lasted several months to use their entrepreneurial spirit to find gold and a route to the orient. Being ill prepared for hard labor and with virtually no survival skills, things were so hard that one man in Jamestown killed his pregnant wife with the intent of eating her. Nevertheless, they persevered.

John Rolf arrived with a few tobacco seeds stolen from the Spanish controlled colonies. He made alliances with the local Native Americans, which led to his marriage to Pocahontas. Within 2 years of his arrival, tobacco was growing in every garden, eventually making Jamestown the first American Boomtown.

Compare this to how we overcome lands today. Iraq is a perfect example. Our government is not honest about why we are really being sent there. We kill and torture the inhabitants (children and puppies included) and destroy the landscape. We force our ways upon them. There is no friend making here; citizens are fleeing Iraq by the thousands every year. A great number of them are refugees in America, where we enforce a policy of bigotry and hate against them.

Religious Tolerance
Ten years after Rolf, a group of religious nonconformists made a similar journey to escape religious oppression. Nineteen families, goats, chickens, pigs, and dogs arrived on the Mayflower with all of the supplies and gumption needed to make new lives for themselves. In the first 3 months, half of them died. They also made alliances with the natives leaving them with the know how to farm the sandy ground. This allowed them to thrive and prosper. The average Puritan was 2 inches taller, averaged 8 children per family, and were 20% richer than their counterparts in England.

America, a land founded partially on the foundation of religious tolerance, now breeds some of the most bigoted and narrow minded people in the world. I feel that as long as you are Christian, you can have all of the religious freedom that you need here, no matter if you play with snakes are have a church practically made of neon created only to make you rich. If not, you can risk everything from simple ridicule to having your place of worship burned to the ground.

Muslims have been in our country since before Columbus with no conflict. Now we allow our media to demonize each one, making each American Muslim part of the 2% worldwide that are extremists. Are we reminded that we aided Saddam Hussein in his failed war against Iran in the 80's? Let's not mention the fact that we trained the most feared of them all, Osama!

Sure, our government gives all religions most of the same legal rights to be a part of our fabric. In Italy, a religion cannot legally exist without a contract with the federal government. Another example is Greece, which barely admits that their "Muslim minority" even exists. Muslims make up approximately 30% of the citizenry of Greek Thrace (who are treated much as legal Mexicans are here in the US) and Muslim refugees from the Middle East are pouring by the thousands into Athens.

These countries were not born of a desire for freedom from religious persecution. They have no moral or constitutional duty to provide it like the United States does. We should look to India, a true faith melting pot, for inspiration. It is the birthplace of four of the world's religions and has true tolerance in both law and culture. This is not to say there is not religious violence in India. However, outsiders and not the citizenry of the subcontinent usually cause the violence. Jains, Hindus, Muslims, and Christians all live together in one village with respect for one another and are entwined in each other's lives. People are not tagged with a label, they are just a neighbor.

Something to Believe In
As the colonies grew, they became ever more important to England. Forty percent of all British exports reached the colonies and the tobacco plantations were making Britain rich. There were huge taxes on all imports and exports. More important was that with their King so far away, Americans had their own way of life. The British were unnecessarily oppressive and gave the colonists no legal representation.

As we all know, the colonists made revolution against the best army in the world, with little chance of succeeding. This revolution is the epitome of courageousness, innovativeness, cooperation, and standing for what you believe in. We won the revolution because we waged war differently, created new and better weapons, and inoculated our troops from disease, a technique taken from slaves.

On recent trips to Valley Forge and the Princeton battleground, I heard about Baron Von Steuben, a gay Prussian military leader that trained Washington's troops in the winter of 1778. He noted that you could simply tell other armies what to do and they did it with no questions or hesitation. The colonial troops would not do anything unless the reason was explicitly stated and they agreed with it. What happened to that?

America has become a capitalist society that is full of people that expect. We expect wealth, material things, and feel self entitled. We believe we are the best, but no longer have to work for it. We have become lazy and sloppy. This loss of drive and pride and confidence in the status quo has cost hundreds of thousands of American jobs and has made our educational system subpar. Americans complain that immigrants are stealing their jobs. If we were willing to work half as hard as they are, we would be guaranteed a job. We also would not be one of the most overweight nations!

Many Americans now are part of a flock of sheep, guided by the staff of radical Christian leaders to hate, maim, and scream for war against people that just want to live their lives in peace. We do what we are told in response to psychopolitical babble that is veiled in secrecy. Though we know the government and their media whores are misrepresenting and lying, we brand those who are brave enough to try to find the truth as crazy. From the outside we must look like zombies wired to Fox News, only making robotic actions based on the subliminal messages we receive throughout the day.

If America and its government held the ideals that created it in their hearts, this would truly be the greatest place on earth to live. But sadly, though we preach these things, they are not regularly put into practice by average citizens or their leaders. We are holding desperately onto the knots in the rope, being dragged through a cave blind and dumb.