Jeff Jarvis has posted about What Makes America Exceptional. He starts with a thorough list, then opens the comments for more. You are sure to be moved, and heartened, and amused, and aggravated but what you find there.
One of my favorites is in a comment from Greg:
And you can judge from afar, but our economic engine is the greatest the world has ever known. Our fighting forces are the simultaneously the most humane and destructive military that has ever existed - they could take whatever they wanted, and don't.And from Charlie:
It's a country in which people will walk across miles of desert and float across open ocean to get in.And from from me: Personal responsibility and the rights that come with it. And Jazz! Interestingly this seems to be a common answer - we are a nation a jazzers.It's a country which sustains a massive attack on innocents on its mainland, but responds militarily with the lowest proportion of civilian casualties in history.
It's a country which has as its primary allies countries which it conquered 60 years ago; and in which its major commercial competitors grew out of financial assistance that we gave to those conquered countries. It's a country which conquers a continent -- and gives it back, clean and new and with its fascist governments replaced with functioning democracies.
It's a country in which fabulously wealthy actor "activists" can go to the National Press Club to speak on government financed TV about how their freedom of speech is being repressed.
I am grateful that by some accident of birth, I was born in the greatest, most free, generous, kick-a** country this planet has ever known.
Posted by Vox at February 16, 2004 02:47 PM | politics