Why America?

The following is the very first column I ever published, back in August.

“Give me liberty or give me death!” proclaimed Patrick Henry prior to the Revolutionary War, and his declaration seems to be ringing around the globe today.

As many as 6 million Mexicans take the risky trek through the heat of the desert to enter this country illegally each year.

Nearly 98 thousand Cuban refugees risk their lives annually to flee the tyranny of Fidel Castro’s regime and come to the US.

Tens of thousands of Americans have put their lives on the line and died in battle for their country.

Why is that?

There is only one answer as to why these people would risk their lives in one form or another for America: She is the premier land of freedom and opportunity. There is no other like her. Since the Constitution first went into effect in 1789, the United States has had a reputation of being “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” and it is well-deserved.

Our Constitution grants us rights unseen in other countries, yet we don’t think about the benefits that this country has to offer, the rights that we have that are denied to Cubans in their country, to Iranians in theirs, and to the news network that was shut down in Venezuela for opposing dictator Hugo Chavez.

While our government is criticized by foreign nations as being “oppressive” in its “spying” and “censorship,” American citizens continue to enjoy more personal freedoms than the majority of other countries on the planet. We constantly see headlines in the newspaper about the government engaging in “illegal wiretapping” and “torturing” of accused terrorists, issues which are entirely debatable. And while headlines rage negatively about our civil rights, we don’t compare the right of Muslim schoolgirls to wear hijabs in the US to the prohibition of that, and other religious garb, in France, coincidentally our biggest Western critic. We in the US have the right to freely exercise our religious faith, or lack thereof, as granted to us by the Constitution.

We can also look at the US in comparison to the UK. We are blessed to have a Constitution which, at least in the amendments, spells out our rights as citizens - rights which the courts, overall, do a decent job protecting, even if the judgments are sometimes disputed. Those disputes aside, we have certain rights that cannot be abridged. The British have rights, but they're not spelled out on paper. They're subject to change without a Constitution guaranteeing those rights to their citizens.

The United States is by far the most privileged nation on Earth. We do not experience poverty like those of other nations. Our poor (consisting of only 12% of the population) often own a home, have a car, and posses a computer with internet access. That is poverty in this country, and we are lucky not to know what poverty is in other countries. For example, 480 million people live on less than two dollars a day in Sub-Saharan Africa alone, yet the number of people in such conditions in the US is so infinitesimal that they’re not even included in reports.

Our GDP per capita is around $44,000, and our GDP PPP is around $13.13 trillion. Our unemployment rate is at a mere 4.4%, lower than the average of the previous four decades. This economic prosperity was made possible by, yes, American hard work and ingenuity, but also by a government system and citizen-granted rights which enable for a thriving economy to occur.

It’s hard to imagine a United States of America without the Constitution. We could potentially see Muslims denied the right to practice their faith because of a small band of radical jihadists bent on destroying America. We could see a 15-year-old accused of murdering a neighbor locked in jail for life without trial, liberal Democrats locked away for opposing Bush administration policies, and the New York Times shut down because the government opposes it. Heck, I could be denied the right to publish this column because I’m “too young.” The list goes on and on for what reality in this country would be without the Constitution.

Our rights are also protected in the very nature of our government structure. This document laid the groundwork for a phenomenal system of government which, despite its flaws, has worked extraordinarily well over the past two hundred years. In three branches of government (legislative, executive, and judicial), in addition to the people, we have checks and balances as well as separation of powers. In separate branches of government we find the powers of one branch checked by the others; in the people we find a stopgap against the tyranny of government; and in a republican government structure we find preventions against the tyranny of the majority.

We are blessed, as Americans, to have a constitution which so clearly establishes and protects our rights as citizens in as many ways as it does. The document enables us, the most privileged people on Earth, to have many personal freedoms and protections of those freedoms that we take for granted.

The United States has always been known as a land of opportunity. No matter what your circumstances in the beginning, you have the right to live and experience life and to become your own individual. In America, you can do something with your life; each and every one of us has the potential to live the American Dream. Everyone can rise from rags to riches; it’s been done before, and it can happen again. In America, you have rights that enable you to build something that becomes greater than yourself.