Praise for the USA

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then one in a mid-May dispatch from Time magazine was worth at least five times that many.

While not available for reprinting, the picture—which accompanied a story on immigration—showed five people pressing against the border fence between Texas and Mexico.

Several had arms and hands extended through openings in the barrier in a symbolic grasping for hope in a better place: the United States of America. Such a scene raises the question, “If the USA is so bad, why are so many people trying to get in?”

USA Land of Opportunity

Over the years, I’ve known a number of immigrants, including my mother. Her father had emigrated from Ukraine to western Canada in the late 1800s, with Mom arriving in 1923.

She later moved to Chicago to live with her oldest sister, herself married to a Ukrainian immigrant. Mom became a naturalized citizen after marrying my father, a native of Minnesota.

I’ve known immigrants from lands as far away as China, England and points south. The common characteristic they express is a love of our nation as a fantastic place of opportunity.

So did the Vietnam War-era veteran whose memoir I recently worked on. His first-generation American father with roots in Finland taught him this country had given him a chance to make his way in the world like none other.

Then there was the discussion period of a local civic group, when a young woman just out of college was surprised when two people from other places in the world talked about their love for America.

Since she had apparently ingested a heaping of anti-American propaganda on some campus, the woman couldn’t imagine why they felt that way. She thought we had so many problems and harbored so many injustices that we couldn’t be that great.

If she wanted to know why living here is better than many other places, she should ask another of my aunts, who would tell her, “Freedom and democracy.”

Acknowledging Flaws

Of course, the danger of an overly warm embrace of this nation is a refusal to see its flaws or even acknowledge it has any. I remember the “America, Love it Or Leave It” bumper stickers that were so popular during the 1960s amid raging anti-war protests.

Such sentiment still exists in certain areas. But I think a bigger danger is the antifa and other leftists pushing for such radical changes you’d think they would welcome a Soviet-like state on our shores.

To which I would say: did you notice that the Soviet Union collapsed after inflicting 75 years of horror and millions of deaths on its citizens and others around the world?

Certainly there are problems. Any nation composed of weak, mistake-ridden, and sometimes egotistical leaders will have problems.

Yet as the USA prepares to celebrate our 247th birthday next week, it would do a lot of critics to remember that even speaking out about the ills they perceive could get them locked up (or worse) in many parts of the world.

We can’t reform the country by tearing it down.