By David Randall
I hope that today as we log into Route Y for the final e-mail check before the holiday, as we drive home on safe roads, and as we share a warm meal in a warm house with, for the most part, a warm family, we are grateful.
I also hope that as we listen to the political debates for the 2004 elections, as we watch our current president continue to handle the difficulties of reconstruction in Iraq, and as we watch the Terminator start his reign in California, that we are grateful.
Perhaps not grateful for the current characters and agendas that dot our political landscape, but grateful for the system that has brought us this far — a system of individual rights and responsibilities that has continued to lift us out of subsistence and away from oppression.
The growth and the power of the U.S. economy never cease to amaze me. We have had our hiccups, like the great depression that left almost a quarter of the population without jobs, but in some countries joblessness like that is normal. For the most part, well over 90 percent of willing Americans are working. And included in that job market we can find everything from cement truck driver to rocket scientist, floral designer and wine taster, all complete with medical insurance and 401k.
Because the United States has been so successful, people around the world, and even many inside the United States seem to forget what America is about. All they see is a big pie, a big ball of Gross Domestic Product waiting to be allocated to their favorite cause and to protect their favorite right.
But America there is more that economy, it is ideology of freedom that has been burning longer and brighter here than in anywhere else in the world.
Sometimes it”s hard to separate myself from phrases I”ve known since I was five, but recently I”ve come to appreciate more and more the words of the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
I have realized how powerful those phrases and that ideology has been on the lives and minds of American history. We believe that all people have rights, all people are valid and that no one should be oppressed or denied the chance for happiness.
We can hear arguments from minorities, women, immigrants, religious groups, almost any side, and see where that ideology has been invalidated by bad legislation at one point or another. But over the years freedom has won out, and will continue to win out.
I guess what I want to say is that as we deal with politics, no matter what side we fall on Abortion, Iraq or Schwarzenegger, let us be conscious of the long run, and be grateful for what America has been, is and will be.
