Thursday, June 12, 2008

What does it mean to be American?

Have you ever thought about what it means to be American? Is it citizenship? Is it loyalty to a piece of land or to the government that controls it? With so many cultures and languages expressed in this country, what does it mean to be American?

It's a question I have wrestled with for some time. Living in Miami has afforded me the opportunity to have this discussion with a variety of people from very diverse cultures and backgrounds. And I have found people's understanding of what it means are equally diverse. Even among multi-generational Americans, their definitions can be quite different.

I would argue the being American is the allegiance to a certain set of ideas. To fully understand the idea of America, one would have to dig back in history to the creation of this country. What were the ideas of the men who created this country? What were the ideas of the minds who inspired them. What were the ideas of the patriots who risked their lives and fortunes to make those ideas a reality?

America was an experiment created, or invented, at the height of the Enlightenment, otherwise known as the Age of Reason. Inspired by the likes John Locke, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, a group of American men expressed the culmination of the ideas of freedom for the first time with a Declaration of Independence, which gave birth to a nation. Many of those human rights were later codified in the Bill of Rights as Amendments to the law of our land, the U.S. Constitution.

For the first time in history, a nation was founded on the idea that all men are created equal and free and have the right to that freedom and the right to pursue happiness as he sees fit. This not to say that we as individual Americans or as a government have lived up to these ideas, nor have we done such a fantastic job defending them. Our history is riddled with events that exemplify our failures in personifying freedom. However, the extent that we have not lived up to the principles of freedom does not discount the impact or morality of those ideas.

The ideas of freedom, individualism and self-government moved men, women and children to create this country and these ideas became the foundation of American culture. To be American is to say that these are the ideas you value, and you don't have to be a citizen to live by them.

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