Happy 4th July. Happy Birthday America .
What Makes America Unique
Dinesh D’Souza
Sunday, July 4, 2004
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/7/2/155515.shtml
More than any country in the world, America is the land of opportunity. This is usually understood in economic terms: the ordinary person has a better shot at success in the United States than anywhere else. As an immigrant to the United States, however, I view the notion of opportunity more broadly. America is the country where we are the architects of our own destiny. This is the place where we get to write the script of our own lives.
Admittedly the first thing that strikes the newcomer upon arriving in the United States is how well the common man lives. Rich people live well everywhere in the world. In many countries, however, the poor endure a different fate: they are slaves to necessity. The greatness of America is that it has extended the benefits of comfort and affluence, traditionally enjoyed by very few, to a large segment of society.
Very few people in America have to wonder where their next meal is coming from. Even sick people who don’t have money or insurance will receive medical care at hospital emergency rooms. The poorest American girls are not humiliated by having to wear torn clothes. Every child is offered an education, and most have the chance to go on to college. The ordinary fellow can expect to live well into his seventies and have time to play with the grandchildren.
Ordinary Americans not only enjoy security and dignity, but also comforts that other societies reserve for the elite. We now live in a country where construction workers pay $4 for a nonfat latte, where maids drive nice cars, and where plumbers take their families on vacation to Europe. I recently asked an acquaintance of mine who has been trying to relocate to the United States for years why he is so eager to come. He replied, “I really want to move to a country where the poor people are fat.”
Some European countries offer their citizens more welfare state benefits, such as national health insurance. In return, even middle class Europeans pay nearly 50 percent of their income in taxes.
America offers fewer government benefits but vastly greater economic opportunity and social mobility. Only in America could Pierre Omidyar, whose parents are from Iran and who was educated in France, have started the highly successful Internet auction site eBay. Only in America could Ronald Reagan, who grew up poor in the Midwest, go on to become a Hollywood star, governor of California, and then President of the United States.
Other countries can produce success stories too, but they are atypical and improbable. Wealth in the Third World, and even in Europe, is frequently the product of birth or inheritance. In America, by contrast, every city abounds with immigrants who came to the United States with nothing and now run thriving businesses with dozens, if not hundreds, of employees. Moreover, most successful people in this country have earned their own money. The authors of the book The Millionaire Next Door estimate that 80 percent of American millionaires are entirely self-made. That’s why Americans tell their sons and daughters, “Be what you want to be,” because they have often enough seen people who have fulfilled their dreams. Elsewhere such a notion would be considered naïve.
This phrase, “Be what you want to be,” captures something about America that goes beyond economic opportunity. To explain what that is, permit me to say something about my own life. Recently I asked myself: what would my life have been like if I had never come to the United States, if I had stayed in my native country of India? I grew up in a middle-class family in Bombay. My father was a chemical engineer, my mother, an office secretary. I was raised without luxury but not lacking in any necessities. My standard of living in America is higher, but it is not a radical difference. My life has changed far more dramatically in other ways.
If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived my entire life within a five-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have married a girl of my identical caste and religious and socioeconomic background. I would have faced relentless social pressure to become a doctor, an engineer, or a computer programmer. I would have socialized largely within my ethnic community. I would have had a whole set of opinions that could be predicted in advance. In sum, my destiny would to a large degree have been given to me.
By coming to America, I have seen my life break free of these traditional confines. I came to Arizona as an exchange student, but a year later I was enrolled at Dartmouth College. There I fell in with a group of students who were actively involved in politics; soon I had switched my major from economics to English literature. By the time I graduated I decided that I should become a writer, which is something you can do in America, and that is not easy to do in India.
This is a country where you can even make a career as a comedian. I would not have liked to approach my parents and tell them I was thinking of becoming a comedian. I do not think they would have found it funny.
Soon after graduation I became the managing editor of a policy magazine and began to write freelance articles. Someone in the Reagan White House was apparently impressed with my work, because I was called in for an interview and hired as a senior domestic policy analyst. I found it strange to be working in the White House, because at the time I was not an American citizen. I am sure that such a thing could not happen anywhere else in the world. I also met my future wife in the Reagan administration, where she was at the time a White House intern. (She has since deleted it from her resume.) My wife was born in Louisiana and grew up in San Diego; her ancestry is English, French, Scotch-Irish, and German.
In traditional cultures like the one I grew up in, birth is destiny. Those cultures attach a great deal of importance to such questions as what tribe you come from, whether you are male or female, and whether you are the eldest son. Your future and your happiness hinge on these things. If you are a Bengali you can count on other Bengalis to help you, and on others to discriminate against you; if you are female, then certain forms of society and certain professions are closed to you; and if you are the eldest son you inherit the family house and your siblings are expected to follow your direction. What this means is that once your tribe, caste, sex, and family position have been established at birth, your life takes a course that is largely determined for you.
In America, more than anywhere else in the world, people are the authors of their own destiny. This is no less true for your children than it was for you. When you say to your children, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” the question is open-ended, it is they who supply the answer. Far from trying to control the destiny of their offspring, American parents typically send their teenage sons and daughters away to college where they live on their own and learn independence. During these years young people choose their own fields of interest and develop their own identities.
It is not uncommon in the United States for two brothers who come from the same gene pool and were raised in similar circumstances to do quite different things: the eldest becomes a gas station attendant, the younger moves up to be vice president at General Motors; the eldest marries his high-school sweetheart and raises four children, the youngest refuses to settle down; one is the Methodist that he was raised to be, the other becomes a Christian Scientist or a Buddhist. What to be, where to live, whom to love, whom to marry, what to believe, what religion to practice — these are decisions that Americans make for themselves.
In most parts of the world, no matter what your socioeconomic background, your identity and your fate are to a large extent handed to you. In America, however, we determine these things for ourselves. Here our destiny is not prescribed for us; it is constructed by us. Immigrants who come here seeking economic opportunity are amazed to discover that America offers an even greater form of opportunity: the opportunity to direct the course of one’s life. This notion of people being in the driver’s seat of their own life is the incredibly powerful idea that is behind the worldwide appeal of America.
If there is a single phrase that captures this, it is the “pursuit of happiness.” America doesn’t guarantee happiness, but it guarantees you the freedom and the opportunity to discover happiness for yourself. Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul analyses the term in this way: “It is an elastic idea; it fits all men. It implies a certain kind of society, a certain kind of awakened spirit. So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism. But it is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”
Dinesh D’Souza, the Rishwain Scholar at the Hoover Institution, is the author of What’s So Great About America. Email: [email protected]