Thank God for America

I am not shocked by much but the hatred of America and American values by well educated and well known Americans is shocking. I can only conclude there is something either deeply wrong with the education of such persons or something deeply wrong with their souls. I read a recent post by Michael Barone that addressed this issue. He says, in part:

What (The self-haters) have been denied in their higher education is an accurate view of history and America's place in it. Many adults actively seek what they have been missing: witness the robust sales of books on the Founding Fathers. Witness, also, the robust sales of British historian Andrew Roberts's splendid "History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900."

Roberts points out almost all the advances of freedom in the 20th century have been made by the English-speaking peoples -- Americans especially, but British, as well, and also (here his account will be unfamiliar to most American readers) Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. And he recalls what held and holds them together by quoting a speech Winston Churchill gave in 1943 at Harvard: "Law, language, literature -- these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice and above all a love of personal freedom ... these are the common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples."

Churchill recorded these things in his four-volume history of the English-speaking peoples up to 1900: the development of the common law, guarantees of freedom, representative government, independent courts.

More recently, Adam Hochschild, in his excellent "Breaking the Chains," tells the story of the extraordinary English men and women, motivated by deep religious belief, who successfully persuaded Britain to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself. Their example was followed in time, and after a bloody struggle, by likeminded Americans. The default assumption portrays American slavery as uniquely evil (which it wasn't) and ignores the fact the first campaign to abolish slavery was worded in English.

The default assumption gets this almost precisely upside down. Yes, there are faults in our past. But Americans and the English-speaking peoples have been far more often the lifters of oppression than the oppressors.

Michael Barone
Copyright 2007 Creators Syndicate

I saw this same kind of parental-hatred when I was at the University of Cincinnati from 1967-73 Those were hot times of protest on the campus and I was often caught in the middle by radical students and teachers, both whom despised America. They lived off the sacrifices and freedoms of America but hated the nation that nursed them.

Perhaps that hatred can be traced back to a feeling of inferiority and dependence to such heroic leaders in the past. Like an adolescent who despises his parents because he must take their food, clothing and shelter the millionaire rebels in America despise the very system that allows them the freedom to speak so angrily about their motherland.