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Dauric -> RE: Should English and Spanish be America's Official languages? (5/15/2007 11:09:58 AM)
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The American Dream is a very old reference to the fact that people coming here are not restricted by class structures or family ties to their pasts. People came to the new frontier to reinvent themselves, and that it was in America that you could do exactly that. America is still today the new frontier to countries that have histories in the thousands of years.
I am aware of the Guns Germs and Steel, that is the "Technical" side of the success of the United States and includes the times from the colonial period, and remains largely true through the late 1800's / Early/Mid 1900's when the Victorian era and the "Old West" finally gave way to substantial urban populations in most States. "Guns Germs and Steel" covers the U.S. expansion across the continent, but does not cover history much beyond that. It was only after the world wars that the United States actually became a world power and an economic powerhouse, before WWI the U.S. was still considered a provincial outback of civilization, and even up to WWII, the U.S. was considered by much of the rest of the world to be a lesser power to individual nations of europe.
The "Amercan Exceptionalism" argument I make as you put it, is an economic one, that takes hold after the Victorian era, from the World Wars, and specifically World War Two to ... mostly present. This is where he American ideals that the individual's rights, in many but not all cases, trump those of the nation or the comunity. This is the period of the most dyamic advances in technology, where individuals can start a business out of a barn or a grage making something that no-one has ever heard about and turn it in to a billion dollar industry. This is the era where our nation accepted that those of different skin colors actually -have- rights, and those rights are more important than a community's desire to walk over them.
That is the culture that I refer to. That we in the U.S. are free to say as we please, and in large part as long as we don't hurt anyone else we are free to do as we please. We can be inventive, we can challenge our government officials, we have regular exchanges of power that do not require the intervention of out military, or the foration of competing shadow governments.
It is our ability to be inventive that has made the U.S. an economic power. The ability of a single individual to find a new way of doing an old task, engineer that idea in to a reality, and -keep the profits- of doing that work (as opposed to say, old Communism where eveything belonged to the government) that has allowed the U.S. to generate completely new technologies to sell aroud the world.
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Yes the United States has strength in that it has adapted to the newcomers, and in return they have adapted to the United States, It's that cross-fertilization of new ideas on -both- sides that makes the U.S. strong. Simply bending to the desires of a select group of people who are unwilling to make the effort to assimilate is not and has never made any country strong.
I work with a number of former Mexican nationals, they're great people who are making and effort to speak English, and assimilate in to the United Steates. The ones I have a problem with are the ones that leave their countries of origin, and expect the new country to accomidate them in all ways without them making any effort in return.
$0.02,
Dauric.
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