Happy Birthday America

We Americans like to think that freedom everywhere is because of us. Sure it’s an unrealistic way of thinking, but it’s not entirely untrue either. Since the end of WWII Americans have been taught that they did no less than save the world. The effects of that Second Great War, however, did no less than create this modern world.

It is hard to acknowledge the birth of America without mentioning Europe. Likewise, it’s hard to mention the imperialistic spread of freedom throughout Europe without acknowledging America. The thought of that same spread of freedom that used to inspire people to tear down giant walls with nothing more than hammers; or to stand unrelenting in front of oncoming tanks; or to cross vast bodies of water on overcrowded ships, nowadays makes most people squirm with aversion. Why such a change?

229 years ago this country was born with the belief that all men are created equal. We all know those words meant land owning white men and nothing less. Look where we are today. This republic of ours, as imperfect as it has always been, was designed with nothing more than a dream, but it was a dream with so much promise. Jefferson first coined that dream in the Declaration of Independence. It’s a dream that has not relinquished to this very day.

For the fourth Independence Day in a row America is at war. It’s not the first time that this has happened and it probably won’t be the last. Yet this dream that freedom is a birthright has been borrowed the world over. To think that people everywhere if given the choice would not want to rule themselves is probably as incorrect as to think that democracy imposed from the outside is also a value of that dream. To dream small with the American Dream is as wrong as dreaming too big.

America has been the lone pillar of promoting the democratic rule of people in this world. Despite all those who claim that this new form of “imperialism” is as wrong as the centuries worth of European colonialism, please name one country that has guaranteed democracy to so many people more than America has. Our grandest examples are Europe and Japan. Those are the standard at which all other American interventions are measured. As unfair as that might be, it is nevertheless the American standard.

Today the people of Iraq want to dream too. The dream that shook off our own chains of tyranny is now in Iraq waiting for the moment of calm so that they all may rest and finally dream.

Michael Ignatieff, in his essay “Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?,” says it as clear as possible: “Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home.”

It was our soldiers then too in Europe who fought and died to defend freedom “for strangers.” It is our soldiers today that fight and die in Iraq to defend freedom for a different set of strangers. “There is nothing worse than believing your son or daughter, brother or sister, father or mother died in vain. Even those who have opposed the Iraq war all along, who believe that the hope of planting democracy has lured America into a criminal folly, do not want to tell those who have died that they have given their lives for nothing. This is where Jefferson’s dream must work.”

Happy Birthday America. And thank you to all our men and women in uniform, you have dreamed more than any of us. Never, ever quit dreaming.