Demonstrators, media “personalities,” columnists, all manner of mankind tell us hour by hour what matters and manners of life in the USA are problematic. Supposed racism, alleged bias against men and women of differing ethnicity are lined up against the wall and shot dead.
Maybe it’s time to start praising instead of locking ourselves into a bottomless pit of complaint.
This is to “prove” what is “wrong” with America and perhaps what we can do to fix it.
But something is deeply amiss about this approach. In a word, we have about one hundred times as much ink about what’s wrong here in our beloved USA as there is about what is right. But then why do we have perhaps fifteen million entrants, almost always “illegal immigrants,” coming into America in the past two decades? If America is so troubled — and in many ways it is — why do so few Americans — almost none — leave here, and so many want to come here?
When I was a young law student in New Haven, we were always harangued by classmates and teachers about how flawed we were and how lovely “socialist” nations were by comparison. The standard example was the USA versus Cuba. Supposedly the USA’s “gangsters” had made of Cuba a huge bordello where young women were raped by wealthy “gringos” and made to kneel and perform sex acts on American visitors even when the young women were extremely young indeed.
This behavior by American businessmen was supposedly one of the major motivators to hatred of the USA so intense that Castro supposedly wanted to have nuclear war with the USA and have his country virtually annihilated rather than settle his differences with us peacefully.
When I was at Yale, the Vietnam war was at flood tide. Three of us in my class went off to help there. One was perhaps the most capable human being I have ever known, Duncan Kennedy, a Harvard BA and an inspiring student for me to learn from. Duncan started the program of learning motivated largely by class and racial differences. It’s been more than fifty years since we graduated, and I am still inspired by his genius.
He did not create the concept of “critical legal studies” but we carried it far into the 20th century. I miss him every day. My wife and I also miss his hilarious and ingenious wit, carried on by his screamingly brilliant wife, “Mopsy” Kennedy, an heiress. It was always a source of insight how many of my “Bolshevik” classmates married heiresses.
Anyway, I’m also endlessly impressed by Vietnam. We fought a long and bloody war there for too many years. Supposedly we raped and tortured their women and girls day by day, hour by hour. But when the war was over, tens of thousands of Vietnamese women took every chance they could to get to this America which was supposedly vicious, thoroughly criminal America.
Why? Perhaps because U.S. per capita GDP was roughly ten times that of Vietnam. Perhaps because the USA allowed, even guaranteed, free speech. Perhaps because the USA, supposedly a nation of criminals and gangsters, did not require that a bribe be paid to the bureaucracy for even the tiniest of licenses or permits.
But we could go on forever about this kind of comparison. There is a basic difference: America is a free, prosperous country in which every citizen gets a license to succeed at birth and gets rights that the Vietnamese and other “third world” peoples can only dream about.
Maybe it’s time for us to show some gratitude instead of endlessly complaining about our beautiful country. Maybe it’s time to start praising instead of locking ourselves into a bottomless pit of complaint. Maybe it’s time to start.
READ MORE from Ben Stein:
Everything Is Leading to a Bigger War
