A Patriotic Post

This Independence Day is coming quickly to a close, so here is a quick attempt to say something about my country.  I won the lottery of life by being born in America.  There is no better place I could live.

The strength of America has come from its citizens.  People who lived and died for the ideals of freedom like the founders of this country.  The only way America will be strong in the future is if people continue to work hard and live up to the rightest ideas of liberty and human rights.  Nothing good ever comes without a lot of hard work and sacrifice.  My great fear is that too many Americans today live with a sense of entitlement and in a way which is inward and self-directed.  Being a true citizen means living a life which is poured out for others so that they can live with the same dignity you do.

Our country may not always live up to its founding ideals, but it needs heroic individuals like you who will carry them out.  It needs people who will recognize the founder's vision of human beings as creatures with special dignity and essential equality.  In the words of Chesterton, America needs men and women who will "hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing"

"Men did not love Rome because she was great.  She was great because they had loved her."
-GKC

ADDENDUM:
Above I wrote about the danger of Americans living "with a sense of entitlement and in a way which is inward and self-directed."  While a sense of entitlement is at all times to be eschewed, working hard to better primarily one's own lot is not such a bad thing.  Upon reflection, I realized that one of the American ideals is the ability to shape one's own destiny.  When the colonists dumped tea into Boston harbor, I doubt it was because they were concerned with the tea tax shrinking the discretionary income of the working classes.  They were upset because it raised their tea prices (and of course the general intrusion by the crown it represented, plus all those other taxes...my point is that they were acting in self interest.)  The American revolution is a story of people fighting for their freedoms and their land.  Rosa Parks stood up (or rather sat down) for her right to a bus seat.  Of course she knew it wasn't just about herself, and there were others who supported her even though desegregation didn't benefit them. My point is that Rosa Parks wasn't fighting for Abe Lincoln's right to wear a tall hat, although she might have worn one alongside him if it came down to that.  America was built by people who wanted to make life better for themselves and for their children.  Even our prided economic system, capitalism, contains the basic idea of self-interested action which ends up benefiting everyone.  America will continue to be a great country if it continues to remain a land of opportunity.  It must continue to be a place where hard work and ingenuity is rewarded, where the social classes are mobile, where anyone can be president.  This is and forever will be the challenge to America.