America

A friend recently sent me an email with a PowerPoint attachment named "voted best email of the year." Intrigued, (and more than a bit skeptical), I opened it.

Turns out I was right to be skeptical. It was a slide show of poor, overworked, under-clothed inhabitants of various Third World countries and tin-pot dictatorships. The text moaned on endlessly about how "fortunate" we are, how "lucky" we are, how we should remember that we're "blessed."

Here was my response.

---

I spent the first six years of my adult life as a young Marine, traveling from one Pacific Rim craphole to another, and then through a series of Middle Eastern despotic states. I later visited former Warsaw Pact countries. The experience taught me this lesson: Americans have, like our forefathers, the conviction to stand up and fight – and kill, when necessary – for a better way of life for ourselves. The people in those sorry excuses for countries do not. They are waiting for someone to give them a better way of life.

The American Revolution did not happen by accident, nor was it fought by other people’s armies. It was fought by ordinary citizens: farmers, merchants, school teachers, et al. They were poorly armed, utterly untrained, and were setting themselves against the largest, best-equipped, best-trained, most modern military force on the entire planet. Every right-thinking person in Europe knew the "rebellion" -- as the British termed it -- was doomed to failure.

Only it didn’t fail.

It succeeded – and not because of better weapons, or better training, or bigger armies or stronger ships. The American Patriots had none of those things. It succeeded because of conviction. They believed – truly believed – that freedom to live and work as they chose – and leave their children more than they started with – was a thing worth risking their livelihoods, their families and even their lives to obtain. They were not willing to bend under the heel of the Crown and say “yes, milord,” then mutter under their breath about how unfairly life was treating them. They decided they’d rather die fighting against overwhelming odds. So they stood up and told their oppressors, Do Not Tread On Me.

Misplaced compassion is to me a very, very dangerous thing. It leads to so-called compassionate conservatism, then liberalism, then leftism, then communism, and finally despotism and poverty. Misplaced compassion also leads to idiotic ventures like Iraq, wherein we are trying to fight someone’s revolution for them and then gift them with a democracy. The entire venture is doomed to eventual failure – probably a spectacular failure. Nation-building has been a bankrupt concept since its inception and remains so today.

America is unique in human history, though many Americans have forgotten that under the constant onslaught of “one-worlder” and anti-nationalist nonsense with which the media bombards them on a daily basis. We have what we have because of who we are, not from divine providence or blind luck, and we are under no obligation to share it. We are accountable to ourselves and no one else. So I save my compassion for my family, my friends, and my fellow Americans – where it belongs.

This coming Monday is Memorial Day. While drinking a beer, raise a toast to the men and women who had such conviction that they willingly set themselves in the path of destruction. They did that not to be heroes, but so that their families and their descendants would not have to live with poverty and oppression. If you want to thank someone for what you have and how you live, thank the honored dead. They made it possible.