Since the morning of September 11, nearly five years past, we have looked at the world with open eyes. From our five-college hamlet in the hills, we have seen a global political landscape caught in the winds of a thousand storms of change, and for the most part, we do not like what we have seen. We look abroad, and we see a world inflamed by a fanatic religious crusade against the free and prosperous nations of the West.
We look to the east, and we see that very crusade emboldened and embroiled by a useless and impossible war, waged indefinitely in a historical hotbed of violence by ours, the most powerful nation of all.
We look within our own borders, and find that all meaningful discourse on these matters is stifled by an all-too influential news media, set on promoting fear and provoking antagonism in search of higher ratings and readership.We look at ourselves with a critical eye, as is habit to the scholarly and academic, but the more we look, the more we are displeased.
We begin to see ours as a nation of corrupted politicians and an intellectually handicapped citizenry. We see brutish businessmen closely in league with an all-too powerful federal government. We see a completely commercialized American landscape, scattered with strip malls and dotted with televisions, and we begin to lose our faith. We begin to doubt, we begin to detest, and like those hot-headed youths who stood in our shoes in a similar time of transition some forty years ago, we begin to denounce our nation itself. Here, however, we make a great mistake.
Through all our enumerations of folly, through all our criticisms of government and peers, through all our tired shakes of the head and our skeptic sighs at sight of the morning’s news, we fail to see the truth about our country. We fail to see the invaluable truth of the United States of America. It is a truth not to be forgotten: that in the face of all aforementioned complaints, ours is, without contest, the greatest country ever devised, and the finest nation that the world has ever seen.
It is as true now as it was 230 years ago, when the best minds of the original 13 colonies declared their independence from Britain in a document that marked not only the birth of the United States, but of the modern political era. It is as true today as it was when the core ideas of an intellectual age that produced John Locke’s treatises on government, Adam Smith’s theory of free-market economies and Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation were compiled into the United States Constitution, once commemorated as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man.”
It is true today, because beyond its surface, infected as it may be by vile political and intellectual disease, ours is a nation built on the ideal that mankind is capable of creating for himself a thriving world, where freedoms are secured, vast individual achievement is possible, and justice is meted out by and for the people.
It was a lofty dream, but in an unconquered land removed by an ocean from the rest of the western world, where a stunningly lush and fertile landscape embodied in nature the endless prospects of a brand-new civilization, nothing was impossible. For nearly 200 years, our once-small nation grew to fill its massive borders, flourished into the driving force of an increasingly global economy, generated a historically unparalleled prosperity, and remained to the rest of the world a beacon of hope, a land of potential, and a Mecca for the finest minds and talents. The American dream of a bright and achievable future was, until the very recent past, a dream not only to Americans, but to the world at large.
In our time, increasingly lost as that dream may be in the chaos of a modernizing world, we, the academia, should be wary of forgetting its core in our scramble to face, with lucid minds, the confusion of current events. History, at its forefront in America in the year 2006, has been the story of a slow march towards a better world, marked by footprints of giants and pulled by the gravity of a few great nations and empires. Today, that gravity belongs to us, and the future is ours to forge. To forget the true American dream is to squander that chance, and with it the work of countless men and women who in their greatness made that dream a possibility. To forget our ideal is to go back on a promise made long ago, a promise intrinsic in every word of our country’s constitution: the promise of a new world of wisdom, of freedom, and of justice.
James Mathews is a Collegian columnist.
