Define what it means to be an American.

[Esmeralda]

Here are two examples:

To me a American is anyone that holds the ideal that freedom and Independence is more important than anything else on earth,as a nation we believed this once and it made us very unique but due to lies and constant fighting among ourselves we have tarnished that dream now people come here for opportunity and to better their lives when they should be coming here to inter grate and add to the experience not to just take advantage of it,we had a noble idea I hope someday something will inspire us to seek out liberty and realize we have made mistakes and will make more in the future be still we have not had to build a single wall to keep people in. God Bless America.

To be an American simply means your mother happened to give birth to you in America. It really doesn't mean anything contrary to popular belief. We are not better, smarter, kinder, meaner, more advanced, more civil or any different at all than any other human being born in any part of the world. We are lucky....so far...that we have a society ruled by a government that allows us to be who or what we want to be. We have good people, bad people, smart people, dumb people, and yes, we even have home grown terrorists and religious zealots just like everyone else. It aint so fun to be an American these days. Fear, I fear will take away many of the freedoms we once knew.

PLEASE KEEP IT CIVIL AND SANE. Thanks.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Here are two examples:

To me a American is anyone that holds the ideal that freedom and Independence is more important than anything else on earth

And yet we have very strong and vocal ideological forces in America who disagree with this position. They work to restrict the right for people to freely and independently choose their associations. They force bakers and photographers to associate with homosexuals when these people choose not to.

These same forces work diligently to create dependence at the expense of independence by building bureaucratic monuments to welfare redistribution which works to strip independence from the recipients and strip freedom from those who are compelled to fund the redistribution.

as a nation we believed this once and it made us very unique but due to lies and constant fighting among ourselves we have tarnished that dream now people come here for opportunity and to better their lives when they should be coming here to inter grate and add to the experience not to just take advantage of it

I do agree with you here. Again, the same forces I mentioned above have brought us to this state. Cultural assimilation is not a pretty process. To force people to abandon their culture and join our culture involves shaming, shunning, mocking, discriminating, etc. These are all hurtful processes but they achieve a very beneficial outcome, they make foreigners into Americans. What we have now are no hurtful processes playing out in the cultural sphere, so all Americans are now "enlightened and tolerant" and our neighbors are foreign economic opportunists who destroy our sense of cultural unity and belonging by putting their cultures to be the equal of America culture.

we had a noble idea I hope someday something will inspire us to seek out liberty and realize we have made mistakes and will make more in the future be still we have not had to build a single wall to keep people in. God Bless America.

Yes, the experiment of America up until the late 1960s produced phenomenal results. There was nothing preventing the rest of the world from accelerating and competing against us but they were stuck in their cultural ways and so our cultural experiment simply out-competed them and produced fantastic results.

Our mistakes are laid at the feet of those who wanted to destroy the old order, the one which worked so well, and to replace it with a new order, a more "enlightened and tolerant" order where "tolerance" was elevated to the highest value. We are now too far down that road for a repudiation to take place. People are too committed to this failed experiment to ever admit that it is a failure.

We don't yet have a wall making us prisoners to what the reformers have created but we are seeing drastic increases of people who are renouncing their American citizenship and our government is taking steps to make is significantly more difficult to make such renunciations. The wall being built isn't a physical one, it's a bureaucratic wall that is being erected.

We are not better, smarter, kinder, meaner, more advanced, more civil or any different at all than any other human being born in any part of the world.

Actually, we were. We accomplished phenomenal achievements and there was no impediment to other nations doing the same but they never did. The people who left their countries and settled here were cut from a different cloth than those who stayed behind. When these Americans came to our shore they weren't coddled or welfarized, they sunk or swum, they lived or starved and many who did arrive (about 30%) returned back to their homeland because America was not for them.

Our people actually were different. Being a stranger in a strange land and persevering instead of tucking tail and going back home is a quality which both shapes a culture and shapes one's descendants. It was our ancestors who built our nation and drove it toward greatness when other nations couldn't do the same. Sadly, those same reformers didn't like the people who constituted America and so they worked to import a kaleidoscope of peoples and coddle them and care for them and subsidize them and favor them with special status and so the greatness of the people who constituted America changed and we became soft, dependent and ordinary for exceptional achievement inspired envy from the social reformers who now continually harp on inequality of outcomes and seek to punish success.

We are lucky....so far...that we have a society ruled by a government that allows us to be who or what we want to be. We have good people, bad people, smart people, dumb people, and yes, we even have home grown terrorists and religious zealots just like everyone else. It aint so fun to be an American these days. Fear, I fear will take away many of the freedoms we once knew.

We weren't lucky. This nation was built by exceptional people over a time when other nations were well advanced of us - they had cities and institutions and societies while we had villages dispersed amongst a vast wilderness. They were rich and we were poor. If their people had the mettle of our people, then they would have raced forward and advanced the world to new heights, but they didn't really do that, we did.

We used to have a government that allowed us to be free, but now we have a government captured by social reformers and they restrict our rights in every direction. A farmer can no longer grow wheat for his own consumption without government permission, a baker can no longer chose his own clients, an employer no longer has freedom to choose his own employees, that's not freedom to be who or what we want.

 

[Tom Sweetnam]

Most people need to leave this country for awhile, and then come back and answer this question.

 

[Ellipsis]

Here are two examples:

To me a American is anyone that holds the ideal that freedom and Independence is more important than anything else on earth,as a nation we believed this once and it made us very unique but due to lies and constant fighting among ourselves we have tarnished that dream now people come here for opportunity and to better their lives when they should be coming here to inter grate and add to the experience not to just take advantage of it,we had a noble idea I hope someday something will inspire us to seek out liberty and realize we have made mistakes and will make more in the future be still we have not had to build a single wall to keep people in. God Bless America.

To be an American simply means your mother happened to give birth to you in America. It really doesn't mean anything contrary to popular belief. We are not better, smarter, kinder, meaner, more advanced, more civil or any different at all than any other human being born in any part of the world. We are lucky....so far...that we have a society ruled by a government that allows us to be who or what we want to be. We have good people, bad people, smart people, dumb people, and yes, we even have home grown terrorists and religious zealots just like everyone else. It aint so fun to be an American these days. Fear, I fear will take away many of the freedoms we once knew.

PLEASE KEEP IT CIVIL AND SANE. Thanks.

IMO being an American means upholding the the Constitution and the principals of the Founding Fathers.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

Here are two examples:

To me a American is anyone that holds the ideal that freedom and Independence is more important than anything else on earth,as a nation we believed this once and it made us very unique but due to lies and constant fighting among ourselves we have tarnished that dream now people come here for opportunity and to better their lives when they should be coming here to inter grate and add to the experience not to just take advantage of it,we had a noble idea I hope someday something will inspire us to seek out liberty and realize we have made mistakes and will make more in the future be still we have not had to build a single wall to keep people in. God Bless America.

To be an American simply means your mother happened to give birth to you in America. It really doesn't mean anything contrary to popular belief. We are not better, smarter, kinder, meaner, more advanced, more civil or any different at all than any other human being born in any part of the world. We are lucky....so far...that we have a society ruled by a government that allows us to be who or what we want to be. We have good people, bad people, smart people, dumb people, and yes, we even have home grown terrorists and religious zealots just like everyone else. It aint so fun to be an American these days. Fear, I fear will take away many of the freedoms we once knew.

PLEASE KEEP IT CIVIL AND SANE. Thanks.

Not everyone values freedom. And it's American arrogance to assert that they do and forcing such things onto others is therefore justifiable as with going to war for it. Pleanty of people prefer being led, subjugated, and told what to do. Religion's the perfect example of this. Some faiths more than others.

My idea of being an America lies in being free to make some choices from within a certain framework. We're not completely free of course, no nation is, that'd be anarchy. We're not even mostly free as pleanty of industrialized nations have considerably more personal freedoms than we do. But our freedoms are the bigger, more important ones. Like freedom to say just about anything we want, and freedom to worship just about any way we want.

Being an American means as much as you enjoy what freedoms you have, you understand not everyone enjoys them as you may. And being fairly free they're entitled to their way of thinking about things and doing it. In effect, not forcing others to conform to our way of doing things, within the framework of law. It also means that like a good patriot you chastize and correct your own government when it behaves like a loving parent does an unruly child. Being a patriot doesn't mean turning a blind eye and letting your kid run amok. But at the same time it doesn't mwan threatening to kill the child and replace it with a new one...

 

[JOSweetHeart]

Most people need to leave this country for awhile, and then come back and answer this question.

I couldn't agree more because a lot of countries go without so many things that are taken for granted every day here in the states.

God bless you always!!!

Holly