The United States is Morally Responsible to Protect and Bolster Others
What does our country stand for? What do we aspire to? Are we greedy capitalists? While we have a good number of those types, more of us are not greedy, yet we do care about the bottom line: we have to pay the current bills, or debts accrued. In many cases we need to build up the future retirement equities. Some people have worked out their future savings very well. Others of us struggle to put away enough money and value to feel secure, even approaching our mid-fifties.
Enough about me.
We as a country have a history of freedom and justice, which also contains much hardship, cruelty, injustice, and bald self-interest that has hurt many others. Native Americans, the African enslaved, women of all colors, miners or other laborers who have struggled, body and soul, to work out their wages while being killed by the very commodity and livelihood that sustained them: coal, for example. The coal dusts would kill off those that were closest to its extraction. Black lung, many suffered and died from.
Energy in the form of whale oil, and timber, and later all other means, to include earth and sea-extracted gas and oil, thermonuclear and geothermal, solar and wind; all these fuels and energies provided the mechanisms for our nation to build itself and become stronger.
By World War II the United States had become the strongest country in the world, our vast yet ever shrinking globalized planet. It has been multiple generations and we are still the strongest, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most feared and respected.
We, the United States, attract millions of immigrants, and have done so all of its existence since the 1700s. The colonies all did even before the Articles of Confederation. An ever-growing land of power, freedoms, and dreams. We have not stopped, even until now, mostly through the halfway point of 2025. We are still the city on the hill, as Reagan quoted the Bible.
We cannot hide our light under a bushel. We are part and parcel of the hope and promise of the planet.
Have we forfeited our place as a benevolent friend and helper in the world? Have we become part of the insular, selfish, self-serving part of those that do not look to help their neighbors and brothers?
This year, as far as for the arbitrary cuts and mishandlings of the "government efficiency", yes. There are people cut off from their medicines that derives from our wealth, mercy, and largesse. We became the evil Scrooge of Dickens, not the reformed kind and generous one. We are letting Tiny Tim suffer and die.
What, is this I say?
We were never perfect. We saved Europe from itself twice, this past century. We saved South Korea, which is still free and sovereign today. Three quarters of a century later. We attempted to save Vietnam, which ended up a quagmire and painful tar baby that we had to sadly remove ourselves from. Gratefully they turned into a land better than draconian China, a nation of murderers, and of course a hundred times better than North Korea, or what would become the genocidal Cambodia next door, or further past in time the autocratic and deadly Burma, aka Myanmar.
We, the United States, shed much blood in southeast Asia, trying to save them from themselves, worried about the Vietnamese and Thai and Malaysians and Indonesians (domino theory), and ultimately the rest of us, as we feared the awful systems of Marx and Engels would wreak havoc and suffering as it has in Russia, the Soviet Union, and China, which sucked in Tibet, and Cuba, and Laos, and other Communist regimes across the underdeveloped or poor world. South America and the Central isthmus, where the Sandinista of Nicaragua popped up after Castro's Cuba, Chile a blip in the aisles of history, playing so seriously with its ways of socialism and communism, alternative ways to what the United States has achieved and wanted to establish elsewhere.
Africa was the battleground for these theories and political systems, as was parts of the Arab world. Europe rose and fell with Communism, under Stalin or Tito of Yugoslavia, versus the rest of us NATO partners, to include our free and proud Canada. We helped, aided, supported, and strengthened the great Western democracies, the traditional powers that now enjoyed liberal republican governments of what we recognize as the freest and most dynamic, to include Japan and Taiwan, the aforementioned Korean land, to the south, with economic capitalism being the bulwark of hope and solidity, spread across the planet in the far off Australia and New Zealand, the whole Pacific, great pockets of Asia and Africa, like the ever-developing India, South Africa, some other oil-rich counties across that at times too troubled continent. Angola fought with Marxist notions and struggles, as did others, countries that even now are scarcely heard of. Guinea-Bissau, for example.
Brazil has its fights and battles for a fair republic, as did Argentina to the south. These in a few decades past, while Venezuela post-Chaves, now in the era of Maduro, fights for its way to allow the people to live. Indonesia fought through the period of Sukarno and then Suharto, and continues, we hope, in a way of democracy today.
Meanwhile, we the United States, stay strong and mostly magnanimous, through both trade and charity. We are the world's big brother, enforcing with the European Union the values that matter most. Free trade, stability, peace, prosperity, good health, opportunity, brotherly love, also known as fraternal goodness.
We send out folks to bring the world better hopes and systems. Medicine, systems of better food growth and productivity. Our military, the hard power that most, even the worst despots, acknowledge and respect, enable the soft powers of missionaries, philanthropists, medical professionals, development arbiters like agronomists, artists, or other humane professionals to spread and share and intersperse their trades and practices. Money usually speaks the loudest, but the voluntary efforts go far and wide as well, into the hearts and minds of all that we touch.
In Kuwait and other lands, we bolster their existence, otherwise swallowed up by its northern neighbor Iraq, or if not them Saudi Arabia or Iran. They are a free monarchy because of our military and later diplomatic interventions. Each Arab land, each Muslim country, each democracy, large or small, each Christian or Hindu or Buddhist or some other system of belief nation, like the semi-sovereign Greenland, looks to us, the great and quasi-omnipotent United States superpower, some call the hegemon, under a "Pax Americana", to maintain a world of peace and possibility.
Again, Reagan said we were the City on the Hill. We are. We are not the feckless and awful Scrooges of cutting off the hands and arms of those that we choose to buoy. We are not selfish and mean, Stalinist or Maoist killers and prison camp builders. We do not openly violate and abuse the rights and privileges of those that we rule over and choose to support. We do not lord it over the native Americans, or the field workers of our vast crop lands, here or abroad. We do not stick it to the poor of the inner cities or the impoverished of Appalachia. We help the sick, we comfort the indigent, we provide care and humanitarian and educational services for those born with physical and mental handicaps. We give support and share resources with those born with less brain cells, or limbs, or organs. To the blind and the deaf we sacrifice to make their and our lives more whole, bringing up the chasm of inequality to be closer to fair, loving, kind.
That is who and what the United States is.
Sacrifice is sacred. We are honor-bound to be the brave and the caretaking to the weakest of our brothers and sisters, the infirm and the chronically buffeted. Those born with less, we give and share of our own strength to make them whole, as we all become whole and complete as a society.
Who created the "Great Society"? Who coined it, was it Franklin Delano Roosevelt? If not him, a grand human and humanitarian, another U.S. president or civil rights leader, a man or woman who sacrificed or made sacred, holy, even hallowed as Lincoln would say, the efforts of blood and sweat and tears of all our forefathers, our mothers and grandmothers, our aunts and uncles and forebears on and on back to all the great contributions of those throughout history who have made us who we are.
We hold up the martyrs, the countless ones of the Mid-evil centuries of Europe, the priests and nuns spread across the entire planet, the mothers and fathers and kings and queens of all our royal families, the kind and benevolent ones like Princess Diana of England, Great Britain, who like the beatific Mother Teresa showed love and care to those most underprivileged, be they the destitute of Calcutta or the jungle poor of southeast Asia, the hapless children playing among the thousands of mines that littered their local environs and fields.
We have modern day faces of love and magnanimousness. Bono of the rock group U2, George Clooney of Hollywood fame, the modern-day technological magnate Bill Gates, and his ex-wife, Melinda, philanthropists and humanitarians who look to lessen the burdens of millions of otherwise forgotten and outcast hands and mouths that look to some type of hope and chance to make it past the local killers of river disease blindness, or malaria, or diptheria, or any number of other preventable diseases, which of course include the more modern HIV and AIDs.
We, the United States of America, have programs to combat and mitigate such plagues and evils. We can be better, stronger, kinder. We can be bigger and more beautiful, from our largesse and mercy, our strength and bounty, rather than be craven and mealy mouthed, petty and mean. Stupid, cruel, and trite, to use some other words.
We are not that. Are we?
No, we are the country from where my parents went to West Africa and gave of themselves to save and succor others. To save little children bloated with worms, many of whom destined to die before turning five years-old. A land where men and women had goiters, large protrusions hanging from their necks, because there was no iodized salt to stave off those terrible growths. Where a man had infected genitalia that needed to be transported in a wheel barrel.
Do we let these brothers and sisters suffer so? Not this American. We suffer and even die to prevent these horrific scenes and tragic events and cases. We fight and bleed to stop the autocrats, the despots, the murderers like Al-Assad or Putin or Kim, who systematically murder and plunder among their own people and those close by.
Who are, we America? Who are we, United States?
We are a City on a Hill. Norway understands this. I believe that France and Germany do, too. Spain, Italy, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands. Mexico? Argentina? Chile? Japan, and on and on.
We are the hope and dream of the world? We cannot put out the fires and warming lights that we have lit for centuries, that we have developed over the decades and centuries.
We will not, we cannot, stop who we are supposed to be.
Saviors on Mount Zion. That is who my America is. We look to Israel or Jordan to better the human condition. Can we? Do we? Those countries are other cases, as our friends and allies, sure. Save them for another day.
For now, we the U.S. must be who we were meant to be: kind, strong, true.
Wake up, U.S. Be who you are supposed to be. I will live and die trying.
That is who I am, and what we are.
