Let’s take a minute from politics and remember July 4, 1776. The US is the only country ever founded on an idea, as Jeff Jacoby reminds us:
“America was the first nation self-consciously founded as the embodiment of an idea — the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal” and endowed by God with an “unalienable” right to life and liberty.
In a world that had always connected nationhood and citizenship to blood, soil, and ethnicity, the democratic republic born in 1776 presented a prospect that was revolutionary in the profoundest sense imaginable — and Americans from the outset were certain that their model of self-government was destined to radiate outward, shaping the course of human events.”
It may sound a bit old fashioned now but those ideas were very revolutionary when they were written in 1776.
Happy July 4th: Remember that today is about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!
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Yet, black citizens had to drive long miles to use a public bathroom and weren’t even allowed in many hospitals. So much for the “land of the free” and the “self-evident” truth that “all men are created equal”.
Granted, no nation in Latin America ever sold itself as the “grand embodiment of an idea” bound to shape the course of human events and be the world’s moral authority. Yet, as a minority blacks saw far less segregation in Cuba, for example, than in USA – where the segregation was such that blacks even developed a different accent.
That said, the sociopolitical reality of USA never adhered to such virtuous claims – which aside from being propagandistic are also conceited. More so considering that most of USA’s involvements around the world have been utterly dishonest, hypocritical, egotistical, and disastrous.
Not that I want to read like a leftist, for that is the last thing I am and their angle sure isn’t mine, but I am not a propaganda parroting fool either, for slogans and reality don’t always meet. In the Eastern Bloc, “People’s Democratic” was also a synonym for socialist state and, of course, there was nothing democratic about such Orwellian dystopias.
After all, if cuban exiles have been myopic enough to say “Gracias a este gran país…” since 1960, Fidel Castro said the same thing much earlier. Granted, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and whomever would have ruled Socialist Spain (had it not been for Hitler) were also thankful, not to be confused with grateful.
Indeed, the founding fathers were illustrious and admirable figures and USA is great in many aspects but in many regards USA has been, and continues to be, a pretentious fraud that resembles an uninspiring third-world nation when comported to much of the first-world.