by John B. Carpenter, American Thinker:
America’s 250th is a great moment to stop and review some of our greatest hits.
Iwas eleven at the bicentennial and have been a patriot ever since. Seven years living overseas only strengthened my patriotism. I first lived in Singapore when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq swallowed Kuwait, and a Singaporean asked me, an American, what we were going to do about it. If I had been French or Australian, I would not have gotten such a question. I met U.S. Marines in Singapore on their way to Iraq. When I lived in Ethiopia, I met U.S. soldiers doing “demining”—helping remove landmines. There were no Russian or Chinese troops doing that work. When an ingrate Filipino letter-writer to Singapore’s newspaper complained about American intervention in Asia, I wrote a letter to the editor reminding readers that the U.S. sacrificed our blood to make good on MacArthur’s promise to return and free them from Japanese occupation. When China was rattling its sabers, the U.S. sailed its aircraft carrier, the USS Nimitz, between China and its intended victim. A judge in Singapore exclaimed to me, “Thank God for the Nimitz!” No other nation could do that.
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Now, many pseudo-sophisticated people look down on celebrating America’s role in the world. Many on the ideological Left treat American history chiefly as a source of shame, as though our country’s story were mainly one of oppression, hypocrisy, and exploitation. That is part of the Left’s larger project: to instill in us a revulsion at our history so we will be willing to embrace a revolution. As George Orwell said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” But what is worse is when ostensibly conservative folk join in the sneering. Even some on the right, like Tucker Carlson, now mock ordinary patriots as gullible, flag-waving dupes, people who supposedly lack the real knowledge of American history, while they insinuate that they possess the gnostic insight into how depraved America really has been.
Admittedly, the U.S. has done wrong. The founders should have pushed harder at the point of the Declaration of Independence to denounce slavery. The expulsion of nearly all natives was too ham-fisted. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was foolish, as Christian Chinese immigrants make good Americans. Japanese internment during World War II was wrong. Worst of all was Roe v. Wade, which allowed the killing of preborn people. But greatness is not sinlessness. The good the USA has done is weighty, and it is not mythology concocted for jingoistic nationalists. It is real. America’s 250th is a great moment to stop and review some of our greatest hits.
Pilgrims really did come to Plymouth to worship God, planting the 1620 Project, the font of real American greatness. A decade later, John Winthrop, while en route to America, really did declare that the colonists would plant “a City Upon a Hill.” Two generations later, Increase Mather really wrote of those founders, “It was a great and high undertaking of our fathers when they ventured themselves and their little ones upon the rude waves of the vast ocean that so they might follow the Lord into his land.” America really did have a Christian founding.
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