An even more telling statistic might be the number of people who give up their US citizenship each year. I’m willing to bet that it isn’t very many.
I’d like to see a cite for the claim about immigration.
And I bet there aren’t many people giving up their citizenship of any Western country per year.
I know America is far from perfect, but what America means to me is that I will never experience what some of the people I know and care about have suffered. Meaning:
My nieces and nephews will never be picked up by the police (at the age of ten), held for over 24 hours with no charges and no notification to their parents of where they have gone, and have the soles of their feet beaten with nightsticks.
I will never have to worry that if I attend a peaceful political protest, that the military will show up and start shooting machine gun fire at all the children in attendance.
The government will not show up at my home, make me watch while they rape my mother and sisters, kill my father, and then ultimately set my home on fire.
I will not have friends disappear and know they are dead or being tortured.
I will never have to fear as my plane approaches any airport in my country that the minute I step foot on the tarmac, I will be killed or taken away to be tortured.
I will never be walking down my block towards home, and be passed by a pickup truck full of armed men.
But most importantly to me, as an American, I can speak out against these dispicable acts and use my great good fortune to have been born here to help in any way I can.
Born here, other than a short stint in Germany while Father was duty stationed there lived here all my life [so far] and plan to die here [eventually.]
I can be born a protestant, and change to live as a pagan and count protestants, catholics, buddhists, atheists, agnostics, shinto and muslim as friends and nobody cares who I worship.
Not only am I free to worship who I want, but those muslims, born in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Palestine/Israel aren’t slammed into internment camps ‘because we are at war with their birth-countries’ and they can worship as they please. If they want to veil, they can - if they don’t want to veil, they can.
I am required to be educated. I can work in any field I am apt at. If I choose to not work and stay at home and do the wife thing, I can also. I can have children or not have them as I want.
I can vote for who I want to, and I am free to bitch about politics without worrying about hearing that knock on the door at midnight. I can even run for office if I think I can do a better job than the politician I am bitching about…
I can go to a grocery store and buy my food, I can dig up my field and grow my own foods as I want. I can even donate time to my local co-op and get ‘green’ foods and goods and show my support for ecology that way…or I can carry a sign and protest clubbing baby seals for fur. Hell, I suppose I could even wear a baby seal skin coat if I want to, I have seen them in second hand stores.
I can be a civillian and enjoy these freedoms, or [if my life had gone differently and I didn’t crap out my back at 19, I was in the enlistment process] I could be military and defend these freedoms. But I have the choice.
I have the choice because more than 10 generations of my family have fought and died to give me the choices.
Well, yes, but the thread title was “What does America mean to you?” not “What does Australia mean to you?” I’m sure I could come up with great things about every culture.
I’ve lived in several different countries. All I can say is that I am very happy to be a US citizen and to enjoy the freedoms and opportunities that others will probably never know unless they come here.
We are the greatest country on Earth. There it is.
My great-grandparents all emigrated from Poland (then Prussia) in the early 1880’s.
When I consider the difference between America and that part of Europe in the years since then, I am profoundly grateful to be here. Two world wars followed by years as part of the USSR.
I suppose I’d feel exactly the same if they’d relocated to any other free democratic nation, but this is the one I know and appreciate.
When I think about what America means to me:
I think of the economic freedom my ancestors had to better their situation. Several generations ago they were coal miners, blacksmiths, farmers and longshoremen. Nowadays, my family’s firmly middle class, and the children go to college and sometimes even graduate school. Some people in the family own their own businesses.
I think of the place several of my friends have immigrated to, and hope to make their lives and fortunes in. They come from all over- France, Britain, Germany, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Cameroon and Turkey. Most of them came here for education, but saw something here worth staying for.
I think of the great blessing we have in having such a decentralized government. By and large, the laws that govern me are made in Austin, and down the road in City Hall and the County Courthouse. These are far more responsive to the needs of me and my community. The Federal government is pretty far removed from day-to-day life, and this is a good thing.
I think of the great achievements that the country has accomplished or participated in, such as the moon landings, the Marshall Plan, the defeat of the Axis in WWII, and the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s.
I think of our innovative and entrepreneurial “can-do” attitude as a nation. From what I can tell, this is not as common elsewhere.
I think of the myriad religions and faiths that are held in this nation. Despite some continuing social discrimination, the government has been remarkably good at ensuring the freedom of people to worship (or not) as they will.
I think of the willingness of our population to fight for what they think is right, and not just take things willingly. From the furor over gay marriage, to the war in Iraq, to the recurrent fights over religious issues, the nation’s propensity for this is alive and well on both sides of the issues. This is something I’m very proud of, because as long as the American people have this spirit, things will be ok in the long run.
And finally, I think of the amazing devotion and endurance of the officers and men of our armed forces. The vast majority of them take their responsibilities very seriously, and I sleep better at night knowing people like that are looking out for me and my own.
Unfortuatenly, I’m more pessimistic than you are. Knowing that similar things have happened not too far ago, I am not comfortable saying that this would never happen.
So very many of my thoughts have already been posted more eloquently than I could, but I’ll add a few, and risk being redundant.
I love the beauty and variety of nature and of humanity found within our borders. We are as big as the entire continent of Australia and have even more geographic variety, from glaciers to rain forest. (I’m not dissing Australia, BTW, which is a really nice place, too.)
I love that there is probably not a civilization on the face of the planet that is not represented here.
I love the opportunity. Is Bill Gates still the richest man in the world? Regardless of what you think of him or his company or its products, he still has built up an incredible fortune. We’ve had a number of presidents from very humble beginnings. Again, regardless of what you think of their other merits, neither Bill Clinton nor Abe Lincoln had a head start on anybody.
I think this is a great time and place to be a woman. I and my daughters have no restrictions other than what our own inclinations and abilities (or lack thereof) place on us.
I read a lot of history, and often think how fortunate it was that so many ideas came together at the same time to produce our independence and our constitution. Most people aren’t aware that we very nearly didn’t make it out of the 1800s without breaking apart or becoming a minion of some European power.
One thing I’ve always liked about America is that, in a sense, none of us are too attached to it. In so many places in the world, people put up with all sorts of problems, unbearable problems, simply because where they are from is where they have always been from, where their family has always been from.
But America was populated by people who wanted to leave their homeland in search of better things, be it freedom or wealth or both. Every single person in this country is here because at some point, they or their family left some place else in search of something better.
Perhaps that’s why we’re so baffled by conflicts in the Balkans or the Middle East. We just can’t understand the attachment to land those people have. I think being without that attachment is a good thing, a liberating thing. It’s what made so many willing to breach the Appalachians to head out west, and it’s what made so many blacks willing to leave the oppression of the South for the economic promise and freedom of the north.
Our civil war was not fought between competing tribes. It wasn’t over land. It was over which set of ideas was going to govern the future of the nation, much like how our War for Independence wasn’t fought because Americans wanted a homeland for Americans, but because we just had different ideas on how things should be done. If you’re going to shed blood, I’d rather see it over things like that than over bloodlines or a plot of dirt.
In many countries, when refugees leave a country, their ultimate goal is go to back. But here, when you leave the place you were born, you often never look back at all.
I think that’s unique to America. Living here and being American has nothing to do with the composition of your blood or your family heritage. No matter what I do or where I live, I can never be French, or German or Iranian. But all of them can come here and see them and their children called “American” without issue at all.
Not to be pick yet another nit and put a damper on your otherwise great post, but this simply is not true.
Well, most of us.
Except, of course, for the descendents of African slaves, not to mention the Sioux, Delaware, Lenape, Apache, and so on.
:smack: :smack: :smack:
sigh Um, right… slaves. Yeah… my bad.
That’s what I get for posting late at work.
Pundit Lisa, I know you weren’t implying that those things were exclusive to America. But obviously there are some Dopers who think they are:
It’s a land where people have options and yet nobody forces you to do much of anything.
Americans do most things because they want to, not because they have to. Yes, you have to work, but you can work at what you want. Education and opportunity in abundance.
It’s a land of rock-n-roll and country western and classic music–and even major musical theatre. Of Miricle Whip and raspberry viniagrette. Of cheap jeans and designer jeans and $2,000 dresses.
It’s a land where no politician is in for life, but where the people choose a new one every four years.
It’s the land where volunterrism originated. Never was this shown more than on 9/11. Yes, maybe 100 people hit American horribly that day. But millions responded to help, to donate time and money, to make a huge wrong as right as they individually could. And that’s the best.
America is more divided than I’ve ever seen it, more even than during the Vietnam War, IMO. About half the country thinks the president is a slack-jawed ape with dangerous right-wing cronies. The other half thinks he’s the greatest thing since, er, Ronald Reagan. In any number of other countries there’d be buckets of blood in the streets over this kind of division, either because the government is cracking down, or because the people have degenerated into some form of gang warfare, or both. Somehow, Americans have managed to avoid either of those fates. We can legitimately argue, and still somehow get along. I don’t know why that is, or what makes us so different, but I love that about this country.