I hear you,
Red. In his book,
The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama makes this very point: "If we aren't willing to pay a price for our values, if we aren't willing to make some sacrifices in order to realize them, they we should ask ourselves whether we truly believe in them at all."The challenge, he also makes, it to see where we spend our time, energy, and money. "By these standards at least, it sometimes appears that Americans today value nothing so much as being rich, thin, young, famous, safe, and entertained."
He, too, recites a litany of values we assert and subvert - the legacy we leave to the next generation mortgaged by this, "equal opportunity" and yet we "stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty", family, and then structure our economy and lives so that our families get less and less of our time. But his rhetorical point is this:
And yet a part of us knows better. We hand on to our values, even if they seem at time tarnished and worn; even if, as a nation and in our own lives, we have betrayed them more often than we care to remember. ... Those values are our inheritance, what makes us who we are as a people. And although we recognize that they are subject to challenge... they are surprisingly durable and surprisingly constant across classes, and races, and faiths, and generations. We can make claims on their behalf, so long as we understand that our values must be tested against fact and experience, so long as we recall that they demand deeds and not just words.
So, the first question is "What are those values?" But the follow-up question is "What are we going to do about that?"
I'm not saying that we can't share those values with others, they need not be uniquely American (and indeed I hope they are not), but what is it that we, as Americans,
think we stand for? What is it that draws so many to our shores and that so many other nations seek to emulate?
