My love affair with America has been a long one. It began when I was a boy in Africa.
For me, America was a fairyland, a place of stupendous wonders: finned cars, 27 varieties of ice cream, movie glamor, and endless inventions. It was “a shining city upon a hill,” long before President Ronald Reagan solemnized that phrase.
America shone as a place of untrammeled opportunity to do anything and become anything.
Now, after living here for over 60 years, I still find it full of opportunity. And where there is opportunity, there is hope. In America you have the right to try, a core American value.
For me, America is a state of mind as much as a continental country. A place that strives to reach mankind’s highest aspirations. A place that cares. A place that treasures the human spirit. A place that recognizes its own fallibility, and is therefore committed to keep trying.
To me the nation’s finest moment came when it enshrined, for a while, human rights in its foreign policy. Reagan’s great challenge to Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” was the voice of unquestioned moral authority. It derived from then-entrenched American concepts of human rights.
That was the voice of America that the world loves and respects. Unfortunately, it has not been heard lately.
I grew up hearing, “What will the Americans do?” “The Americans will never let it happen” and “If only I could tell the Americans, they would fix it.”
America was granted a gifted start by the Founding Fathers and their sense that things could be different, that the Enlightenment had changed the human trajectory. Kings and the divine right to rule were replaced with the idea of self-rule, and the division of the owners of that rule between the executive, the people, and the judiciary.
This was an advance on the pre-Revolutionary French system of the three estates: the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners. In America, to its glory, the commoners became sovereign.
Of course, we sometimes let ourselves down badly.
Among our greatest and most shameful lapses: the treatment of indigenous people; slavery; and arrogance in dealing with lesser nations, like Cuba and the Philippines. Also, plain folly, like extending the right to carry a gun anywhere, or the willing surrender of one branch of government to another. Or out-and-out silliness, like Prohibition.
The ideas of John Burke and the Enlightenment, which informed the Declaration of Independence and later the Constitution, have echoed through the two and a half centuries of the great project we know as the United States.
America has enriched itself and added to human knowledge by letting in new people – immigrants. They came in waves, and each wave has been a gift to those already here.
We have – with stops and starts and embarrassments, like once excluding the Chinese – harvested the energy and creativity of disparate peoples who have come here. They came to share in the freedom to speak, prosper, own property, and worship God in their own way.
Whether it was the development of the Midwest by Northern Europeans, or the evolution of our literature by Irish writers, or the development of the movie industry by German Jewish refugees, those who have come have brought with them their talent, and the sum has been greater than the parts.
Just look at today’s leadership in technology. Look at the names and you will find they are the names of Asia and Eastern Europe as much as they are the names of the Anglosphere.
I am grateful to this bountiful country for allowing me in, and to its generosity for allowing me to try. I am grateful that it isn’t dominated by one city or one culture. I am grateful that at its best, it shines as the North Star for the world.
But as we celebrate 250 years of the American project, I can only raise two cheers because it is so easy for us to forget what was foremost in the Founders’ minds. We can lose the freedom that has borne us forward, the genius that is in the right to vote, the right to speak freely, and freedom from cultural and religious hegemony.
Happy Birthday, America. Be careful, the world needs you at your wonderful best.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS, PEG, and SiriusXM Radio’s P.O.T.U.S. channel 124.
