George Takei recently gave a speech in Kyoto Japan where he described his history of being locked up by FDR during WWII for the crime of being of Japanese ancestry. It’s a really good presentation:
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He ends it with pointing out that, after all that happened, he’s a proud American.
Many people, American and otherwise, often point to Americas failures and flaws, the times when we did not or do not live up to our ideals, and say that that shows that America is bad. But this is where they are wrong. The only way you can fall short of your ideals is if you *have* ideals in the first place.
The US is fairly unique in human history in that it was a nation founded more or less out of whole cloth, based on ideals. France, Germany, Romania, Japan, China, India… these are nations formed from *tribes,* with borders defined by what they could conquer and hold. Can a Frenchman move to Japan and *be* Japanese? Well, not really. Can a Japanese move to the US and *be* an American? You bet. Anyone can. Doesn’t depend on ethnicity or religion, just so you see what the American ideals are and decide “that’s for me.”
Americans have traditionally seen the US as a place of destiny, a place with a role in the world. Not to conquer it; we went through our imperial phase more than a century ago, snapping up the Philippines, Cuba and so on… then we cut them loose. We have often seen it as our role to spread the ideals of Americas founding principles to the world at large. Those principles are easily looked up in the Declaration and the Constitution. What are the founding principles of Sweden or Belgium, though?