The Culture of Real Freedom Isn't for All

The most recognizable of the phrases associated with the Statue of Liberty, is from a sonnet, The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus. Using the original spelling, this reads: "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. / Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. / I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The monument was completed on October 28, 1886, during a dedication presided over by President Cleveland. In 1892, Ellis Island opened as the chief entry station for immigrants to the US, and for the next 32 years more than 12 million immigrants were welcomed into New York harbor by the sight of "Lady Liberty", among them my grandparents who came separately but met years later. The vast majority of these immigrants was poor but resourceful, hungry for both education and a job, expected little, and only wanted a chance to be part of the American dream. And they enriched this nation for many generations in the process. While this may be enlightening, I brought this up to point out what the famous sonnet didn’t say. Nowhere does it say anything about, “giving me your lazy, your racists, your corrupt, your religious zealots, those among you who turn their back on education and work, and those yearning to live on welfare and disability for the rest of your lives”. This is no oversight or mistake.

This nation was created for those who yearned to be free, work hard, educate themselves, and succeed on their own initiative and group efforts. This nation has always acknowledged the need for a safety net for those who can’t; but not a hammock for those who won’t! The freedom to succeed can’t exist without strictly limited government to prevent government from absorbing and squandering the fruit of individual efforts. I think that many in the country today don’t realize this. Memo to all: The United States is NOT fit for everyone—nor was it ever intended to be.

The United States was a strong concept and an ideal long before it became a nation built on the blood, sweat, ingenuity, and backs of early immigrants. The new world then was very far away, wild, and huge in size—and these attributes attracted many of those drawn to our shores. It was the very space, the size, the wilderness, and the understanding that survival here depended heavily on self reliance and individual effort that built a very distinct American character that soon demanded more freedom than which existed anywhere else on earth! This American character accepted the harsh reality that with real freedom comes the risk of failure—and that too is alright because most of those who made mistakes were strong enough to learn from them and try again, eventually achieving a level of success—or at least improved circumstances.

Unfortunately, over time and as a greater proportion of the population moved from the open spaces, farms, and wilderness towards the urban areas, I think we’ve lost something. Many of those who study their history and understand what it took to create this nation can still reach through their intervening generations and grab onto the immigrant culture of self reliance. Others who still work the land or in hazardous occupations, or have served in the military, also seem to have retained some of the frontier spirit. But for the rest, the results of a few decades of public schools deserting serious economics and US history in a PC rush to multicultural relativism has been devastating! Try to find an educator today who has any understanding of capitalism and can explain how critical creative destruction is to this economic model. ANY failure to a modern educator seems to be a tragedy that more government could have prevented. To a capitalist, failure is often the cleansing process necessary to open the door to success through innovation leading to individual and societal improvements. But the loss of understanding of where our forefathers came from and accomplished has made too many less self reliant and somehow more dependent on others, on government, and on things that never existed on our shores—because they were never supposed to be here! That is what our ancestors fled from in Europe, in Asia, in Africa, and in the Middle East. It is only a small distance from true dependence to general demands for socialism and cradle to grave nanny government programs to take care of us even if it means protecting us from ourselves. Perhaps some should ask themselves if they really ended up in the right country. There are many countries in the world where people aren’t expected to accept the burden of individual responsibility they must accept in this society to truly succeed. Just a thought.