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Jewish World Review July 3, 2003 / 3 Tamuz 5763

Bill Tammeus

Bill Tammeus
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America, and its ideals, still enchant

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | PHOENIX As the airplane — having left wind wakes high over Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico — slides into Arizona's baked air, I'm thinking about America, which soon will celebrate its 227th birthday, I haven't yet seen all of our impossibly huge, pasted-together country, but I haven't missed much of it. Just this year I've been in Illinois, Michigan, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina and now Arizona, to say nothing of Missouri and Kansas.

America takes my breath away. It is deserts — huge reaches of hot sterility in which only the most adaptable survive. ("It's a cool 91 degrees here," the pilot says as we get to Phoenix about 9:15 a.m. It would reach 109.)

It is mountains — explosions of prehistoric land piled up like a monstrous train wreck, yet awesome in its comeliness. It is fecund plains — flat acres bristling with summer's green and gold crops. It is seasides — stony shores or sandy beaches that serve as our borders.

It is forests and undulating hills, prairie fields and congested cities, caverns, river banks, cliffs, farm ponds and towns so small the mayor knows what time you get up.

It is, in fact, hard to get your mind around America, even something as elemental and essential as its geography. But the land, for all its geological treasures, is not what makes America the longed-for destination of so many people on the planet. They, too, get to see astonishing scenery. I have seen the Himalayas, the Nile valley, the south of France. There is beauty enough for all.

Is it, then, the people who make America history's greatest power?

Is it the descendants of stout Pilgrims or resilient Native Americans who once imagined they might live free forever on this bountiful land? Is it the offspring of slaves dragged here traumatized in brutal boats?

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Is it the families of more recent immigrants, such as my great-grandparents from Germany or my grandparents from Sweden, who bootstrapped themselves out of the Old World and into a new one that would have to assimilate them if they were to make a future?

Is it the newest arrivals from Somalia and Vietnam, from the Gaza Strip and Japan, from Ghana, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba and Kosovo? Well, yes and no. America would indeed be immeasurably impoverished without this rich tapestry. All these people built and are building the country. They have drawn and are drawing others to it. But what magnet attracted them? Why did they think things would be different here?

In the end, America is more than its kaleidoscope of landscapes, more than its remarkable medley of people - brown, black, red, white, yellow and other newer hues of such people as my Japanese-American niece and nephew, my Filipino-American great-niece and great-nephew, my African-American/European-American great-nephew and my yet unborn but hoped-for Chinese-American great-nieces or great-nephews.

America, instead, is an idea. Or at least the result — still not final, still evolving — of an idea. Or maybe set of ideas.

The idea is that people live best when they are free. They don't need to be subjected to the whims of oppressors or Machiavellian manipulators with puny souls. They can decide for themselves, individually and collectively, how to structure a society. And they can do this remembering that each individual is of inestimable worth.

Throughout history, many different notions of governance have guided nations. But it was America that brought to the modern forefront the idea that free people can choose how to govern themselves humanely.

The list of ways — great and trivial — America has failed at that experiment could fill an encyclopedia. Still, the idea has persisted. The cynics have not destroyed it. Nor the oligarchists. Nor the mindlessly apathetic.

I can't tell you that the idea will survive to future Fourths of July. That depends on us and our children and their children and theirs. But my guess is that if we lose the idea of living freely, it will be because we gave it up, not because anyone took it from us.

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JWR contributor Bill Tammeus' latest book is "A Gift of Meaning." To order it, please click on title. To comment on his column, please click here.


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Reprinted by permission, The Kansas City Star, Copyright 2002. All rights reserved