Citizenship And Our Society

Kim du Toit
July 4, 2007
7:06 AM CDT

From Peter Schramm:

[T]he idea of being an American by choice points to an important, and perhaps unintended truth: being American is not simply reducible to the happy accident of birth. Americans, both natural and naturalized, must be trained—they must be made—and much of my time these days is devoted to making Americans out of people who just happened to have been born here.

Mine, too.

In fact, the parallels between Schramm and me are inescapable:

We could have stayed in Europe--and indeed, the Germans would have welcomed us as Volk deutsche because of our German surname--but this was not my father’s plan. “We are going to America,” he said. “Why America?” I prodded. “Because, son. We were born Americans, but in the wrong place.”

Ditto. That precise statement was made about me when I made it public that I was going to emigrate to America.

Like Schramm, I had a choice: Australia (because of family), France (the heritage thing) or any number of other countries, with varying degrees of difficulty. But in truth, I had no choice, because I was born American—I just had to come home.

It’s an interesting concept, that. Native-born Americans, I think, actually suffer a disadvantage when it comes to understanding what it means to be an American. In the first place, you have nothing really with which to compare your situation. The natural order of things, you assume, is that people live pretty much the same kind of lives as Americans: with basic human freedoms, with a chance of economic furtherment, and with an attitude towards life that says, ”Why not?” instead of ”I can’t.”

But when you are born elsewhere, and you are trapped in a situation where all around you are a multitude of reasons which say, ”You can’t”—then, my friends, you look to America, as so many countless millions have done, and say, “I want to share in that freedom”.

Which is why Ted Kennedy should be hanged.

Okay, perhaps that was too great a leap of logic. Let me backtrack a little.

Native-born Americans share one common characteristic in that they are all born into wealth. Not economic wealth, of course, although there are those, too. The wealth granted to Americans by birth is a wealth of freedom, of opportunity, and of optimism. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When you are born into this state, it is, as I’ve said, a difficult concept to grasp, because the human condition assumes that our own experience is the universal one. (That, of course, is quickly remedied by exposure to other places—something which we adopted Americans have already experienced.)

There is another facet of the human condition, though, which is at once a blessing and problematic: we always try to improve our lives. We humans are born with a restless, enquiring mind which examines, analyzes and improves. It is almost as strong an impulse as the urge to procreate: it is an inescapable fact of our genetic programming—one which sets us apart from the rest of Nature, because whereas non-human species adapt and evolve by circumstance, the human mind adapts and evolves by our own design.

Indeed, so strong is this desire for improvement that its satiation (or denial) leads inevitably towards stagnation and decay, unless channeled elsewhere.

This is why capitalism is such a good thing, because it channels this extraordinarily-powerful human instinct into a system of acquisition, a means of satisfying and improving one’s material existence.

But that restless spirit is not to be denied: because as soon as material wellbeing is assured, we set about to improve our social circumstances—and unfortunately, that kind of improvement is not always beneficial. Nevertheless, because the desire for improvement is so ingrained, we (incorrectly) assume that all social improvement is as beneficial to society as material improvement.

And here is where the rock meets a hard place. There is a limit on social progress. Sometimes, the attempt to gild the lily will result in something neither a lily nor a living flower, nor something as beautiful. The powerful urge which compelled decent men to abolish slavery was not sated by slavery’s abolition—instead, that same stronge urge has been applied to an ever-decreasing circumstance of the condition of racism, until at the end, as civil rights advocates discover, they have to work harder and harder to find evidence that the root condition still exists, and vestigial correction is made with the same degree of effort and urgency as was focused on the primary, and far worse one.

And at that point, the “progress” becomes something else—retrogression.

As I once told a fellow immigrant who was yet to settle here: “The central promise of this nation has been achieved. Everyone can vote; everyone has the same opportunities to live free and make something of themselves, and is bounded only by his talent and application. We’re only arguing over the details, now.”

And this is where the problems start. People often laugh at me when I refer to America as “Paradise”. How can that be, they ask, when there is so much wrong with this country?

Here’s the newsflash: There isn’t much wrong with this country.

In fact, the biggest problem we face is that a tremendous number of people either do not believe this, or are intent on subverting it for a variety of motives, or both.

Which brings me, finally, to Ted Kennedy.

Let me be clear that I’m not talking about Ted Kennedy personally, but rather Kennedy as the embodiment of the progressive impulse taken to its extreme, and applied inappropriately. When you read what follows, forget about Kennedy the man, and think of him instead as a representative of native-born American society.

Ted Kennedy was born into a life of plenty, and his youth shows the moral laxity and self-indulgence common to someone born into that condition, and with that limited set of skills. To his credit, once the Chappaquiddick incident was over, Kennedy settled into a life of the progressive dilettante; and thanks to his Massachusetts roots, a safe seat in Congress allowed him to play at this game, instead of simply becoming something like Paris Hilton (inherited wealth taken to its extreme degree of moral laxity and sef-indulgence).

What drives a man like Kennedy to espouse a social philosophy as flawed as the one he does? It’s a difficult question to answer: certainly, he’s had no lack of exposure to the world outside America, and has seen oppression and confinement of the human spirit in many places.

But he’s never had to live under those conditions. Protected by his enormous wealth, his Constititutional freedoms, his parliamentary privilege and his social standing, Kennedy has never had to think about basic principles, let alone strive to achieve them. And Kennedy is not a very intelligent man, either, so into such an empty vessel, an idealistic philosophy of equality, no matter how deeply flawed, could easily be poured.

(An interesting aside: even though they talk the same language, Kennedy and Jesse Jackson are poles apart. Jackson, simply put, is unqualified to do anything other than civil rights activism—and as Jackson has neither wealth, political power nor social privilege, this activism is now purely and simply a form of income. It’s behavior which adds a whole new dimension to the word “cynicism”. I wonder how he sleeps at night.)

It would be a mistake to think that my antipathy towards Ted Kennedy is based on some kind of wealth envy. After all, the drive to end slavery came not from poor people, nor from the slaves themselves, but from people with either enormous wealth or social standing, or both. So it’s obvious that good can come from all this—but only when there is a manifest wrong to be righted. After that, however, the returns diminish, but people refuse to believe that—so they strive ever harder, even though the effort is pretty much pointless.

It’s all about freedom—the danger being that in trying for ultimate, universal freedom, we sometimes end up making ourselves less free along the way. That’s not good, but it is redeemable.

The real point, though, is this: July 4th is the day on which we celebrate the first stirrings of our national freedom—and not just our nation’s freedom from foreign rule, but our own individual freedoms, which dated almost from that very day. It’s an important day—probably the most important holiday on our calendar—because it stands as our reminder.

I don’t need July 4th to remind me what this nation stands for. Most immigrants don’t, either. We each have our own personal July 4th, and it’s usually the day we came over, or the day each of us became a citizen. Mine is May 26th, because that was the day I arrived in Paradise to start a new life, in freedom at last, for the first time in thirty-odd years.

At a time like this, and on a day like today, I always find comfort from the words of one very special man. Here they are:

“Somewhere in our growing up we began to be aware of the meaning of days and with that awareness came the birth of patriotism. July Fourth is the birthday of our nation. I believed as a boy, and believe even more today, that it is the birthday of the greatest nation on earth… In recent years, however, I’ve come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation. It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history. Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government. Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people. We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should. Happy Fourth of July.”—Ronald Reagan

I could never forget that great truth, because it has guided my life ever since I can remember. The fact that I’ve only enjoyed actual freedom for the past twenty-odd years out of my fifty-odd is unimportant: that urge, that fierce urge to find it, protect it and nuture it is as deeply ingrained in me as the desire to eat, or the impulse to breathe. I can no more forget what this country stands for—that wonderful, incredible experiment of a people empowered and living in freedom—than I can forget my own name.

That does not mean that July 4th is meaningless to me, though: it’s anything but. So:

Happy Birthday, America!

From your most grateful citizen-by-choice.