The United States was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment philosophy, which upheld reason and individual liberty. Well, for straight white men, anyway. But something in our national character has driven us for centuries — and keeps driving us — to better live up to the ideal that all men are created equal — where by “men” we mean “human beings” and by “all” we mean “all.” That has to be a never-ending battle, but the LGBT community is in now in the heart of that fight. And we’re on the right side of it.
I love America.
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Amen Rob !! Happy Fourth to you and yours ! (from me and mine…)
That philosophy is the one thing that gives me hope. But it’s a choice to embrace light. Not everyone chooses enlightenment and maybe that’s simply a consequence of liberty.
Now that I’m on my eighth month of no job and my unemployment was cut off by the Senate, I’m starting not to love America so much. I have two elderly parents on SSI. One is terminal. They WERE barely making it and I was supplementing their income plus buying their medications. Now I have no way to help them and we are sinking fast. My car is going to be repossessed so I won’t even be able to look for a job. We can’t make the house payments. We’re about to have the phone (and internet) cut off. The utilities companies are threatening to cut us off. We have very little food in the house. I have filled out LITERALLY thousands of applicants and sent hundreds of resumes. How are we going to survive? The sad this is, there are millions more like me.
I bet you would love the USA a lot less if you were in a binational relationship and were not allowed to live with your partner in your own country.
I vaguely remember that in 1992 the Eighth International AIDS Conference, scheduled to take place in Boston, had to be relocated to Amsterdam because US Immigration policy wouldn’t allow people with HIV to enter the United States (non-US-Citizens with HIV at least). Apparently it took a full 20 years for that issue to be resolved. In 2012 for the first time since 1990 such a conference will be held again in the US (in Washington DC).
As a German I will forever be greatful for the United States to have contributed massively to the Allied war efford against my own bug-fuck-crazy genocidal grandfathers (I sure wouldn’t want to have grown up in the sort of world they envisioned for the future) – AND for the HUGE effords put into the post-war reconstruction of my country. I wouldn’t agree with all that entailed and all of the consequences from that (like having bought the right to station nuclear bombs a couple of miles from where I spent my childhood), but hey, beggars can’t be chosers, especially not vanquished, genocidal, and morally bankrupt beggars. But that was 65 (and 30) years ago…
The US did (and still do) contribute to quite some good in the world. But nowadays I also have a LOT of issues with the rules, regulations and ideas that country enforces within and without its borders. Not JUST the death it rains down on hundreds of thousands of civilians all over the world, but also the political bullying it uses to make other countries conform to some very questionable policies.
To still see the US as a home to liberty and equality… I don’t know. It doesn’t sound very realistic from my POV.
Oops… I meant “grateful”, of course. No, seriously, I really, really do mean that. I am. Tremendously.