When you grow up in a household as the oldest son of an immigrant, a legal immigrant from the nation of India, where poverty and unfair living conditions exist all too prominently, your entire upbringing is centered on the fact of the ultimate privilege you have of living in the USA. My mother was a conservative Christian woman who was extremely frugal, having been raised during the depression and so in keeping with the theme my father taught us about not wasting anything, she was the queen of not wasting anything! “There are starving children in India who would give their entire annual wage for the scrap that you want to throw away!” So it is in this context that I cherish our nation’s 250th birthday!
As a young man I was traveling the country playing music and we appeared in South Padre Island’s number one resort hotel for the 1976, 200th birthday of America! What an event! It lasted the entire weekend and was one of the most memorable events of my young career. Now 50 years later we are in a time that is very confusing and very scary for young people because they see the polarization of America much stronger than they see the strength of America.
But an interesting thing has happened in just the last two weeks: hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the world have come to America to participate in the World Cup only to determine in awe and wonder at how great, how nice, how accommodating Americans are to their world neighbors. It almost creates the exact opposite feeling in these visitors than what they were expecting based on the current popular world media. Our nation has been pushed to be completely binary on every single issue; either you are for or against and there is no middle ground. But the experiences of the World Cup visitors have not shown this kind of binary factions but instead a plentiful, welcoming America.
Isn’t it interesting that it takes a foreigner’s view to bring us back to the table amongst ourselves to say: “Maybe things aren’t so terrible, maybe we aren’t that bad, maybe the things that are dividing us are not so overwhelming because when others come to see us, they are not seeing that blatant a division in the USA?!”
One thing that totally opened my mind as a young man was the fact that my dad took us, all six of us around the world in 90 days to help jump start his new International Management Services consulting business. Visiting over 20 countries in such a short time will really open your eyes to how great America is and how well we have it here even if we are not in the top 10% of the population! What our whole family was able to really take in was how good we have it in the USA compared to even strong European nations such as England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands! And when you got to the poorer countries of Southeast Asia and India and Mexico, you realized immediately how much more we had in America than these citizens were able to enjoy.
Our Nation was founded on the principles that as human beings, we were not to be trusted with absolute power and the founders knowing this, created the three level, three branch government we have today with the checks and balances we needed. This basic premise that human beings are both self-absorbed, greedy and power hungry is straight out of the Bible, because every single one of the founders were complete believers in God and Jesus Christ. Knowing the heart of men and protecting us all with these checks and balances has allowed our constitution, and the American way of life to flourish hundreds of years longer than other constitutions whose average length of time is less than 20 years.
This says a whole lot about the brilliance of the framers, especially in their humble agreement and acceptance of the fact that as self-absorbed humans, we cannot be trusted with any kind of socialist or all-powerful government control over our lives. In fact, that’s exactly what the 13 colonies had left Europe to escape that kind of complete control over everyday life. Men with absolute power over other men will use that power in a negative way and our founders made sure that this constitution would not allow that! I know it’s been said a million times before, but we should all reflect on this anniversary about being thankful to God that he has protected this country and provided those founding fathers with enough wisdom and discernment to keep us protected from ourselves.
Happy birthday America and may we survive another 250 years with a much firmer realization that there are thousands of things which we have in common with each other versus the very few things that try to separate us! We all want to live a life of liberty and freedom, free to choose what kind of work we do, what kind of investments we can have, how we can raise our children in a way that they become more successful and have a brighter future than we have and maintaining a strong worldview that protects the unprotected and that comes to the aid of those in need wherever they may be in this planet. May the God that helped create this nation continue to bless us all.