Americans Are Lucky

We here in America are lucky. But maybe not (in my opinion) for some of the reasons usually given.

From earliest times, America was to be a haven and refuge, a new and better society. One of the earliest colonies in what became the United States, that in Plymouth (Massachusetts), established in 1620, was founded by members of the Puritan sect who left England to escape persecution-- and, incidentally, once in the New World set up a theocracy which was anything but religiously tolerant. (Just as a couple of examples, Roger Williams was expelled from Plymouth for having and spreading ideas that the government did not like. Anne Hutchinson was expelled because she and her preaching were deemed unorthodox.)

For much of America's history, there was a sense--quite often expressed--that this new land was special. It was given to the newer arrivals to tame the wilderness, to civilize the "savages." America was seen as "the new Eden," a chance for mankind to make a new start with divine blessing, free of many of the Old World's problems such as religious intolerance, bad governance, and so forth. Many immigrants came to the United States also to make a fresh start in their personal lives, sometimes even to shed their identities and take on a new one. (A bit like Australia, some early arrivals on the shores of America were criminals who had been sentenced to "transportation" and who sometimes made a fresh start in America and even became materially very successful.) It was seen as a matter of divine dispensation: God was giving Mankind a second chance.

But this has to be viewed, today, as myth-making, so that's not what I meant in the opening sentence. I mean we have been spared much of the human misery like, for example, the starvation and homelessness that is going on in Somalia. We have had our Civil War and it cost a shocking number of lives, but many of the earth's peoples have endured decades of civil warfare that has created far more widespread suffering.

Look at the poor people of Vietnam, who not only suffered killing of their civilian population and destruction of their homes and crops and livestock during the Vietnam War; but are still suffering today in the form of birth defects as the result of the defoliant Agent Orange that was sprayed on their land during that war. Not to mention that American soldiers during Asian wars--in Vienam just as earlier in Korea--left behind "war babies" who do not find social acceptance in those countries because of their mixed race and have to live their lives with that stigma.

India, despite astonishing progress, still has shocking poverty among literally millions of its people. China, despite its economic miracle and the prosperity of its urban population, still has much true poverty among its rural population.

I don't wish to make our Civil War or the War of 1812 or the French and Indian War mere footnotes; but in more modern times America has not suffered any war on its own soil. We have poverty and we have problems, but a majority of Americans since the Depression generation have not suffered in the manner that enormous segments of humanity have.

I am not a flag-waver at all, and I am the last one to take an America-can-do-no-wrong attitude. I just want to point out that we, compared to great masses of humanity, have been comfortable and secure, and spared a great deal; and we just don't know what the sad lot is of so many humans.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein