What I absolutely adore about the OP's post is that it shows we still retain a common culture with common values. It is evidence that America really is a melting pot where we take the best from other countries and gives them the opportunity at a new life with the economic freedom to make a better one here.
As the literal type, I am not going to delve into some heavy existentialist stuff. I see Black, White, Latino, Asian, Christian, Native American, Muslim, Agnostic, and Atheists along with poor, middle and wealthy. We all have our differences based on our backgrounds, yet for some reason beyond me, I am astounded with as diverse a country as ours that we have not segmented ourselves and delved into civil war over our differences and social inequities.
There is always that glimmer of hope within us that no matter how bad our lives are now, there are opportunities to better ourselves in the future.
Personally, I have seen friends and family go from solidly middle class paying jobs to having no job at all for 2 plus years. There is constant worry, anger, frustration, unfulfilled expectations, yet I have yet to encounter utter despair amongst my friends and family. I have not heard, "There is no hope for me, I might as well be dead" to this point. What I have heard is "Well, I did not get the job, but something will come along."
This intrinsic hope that there is always something out there is in large part due to our history. We are not castigated because our grandparents were poor farmers. We have no caste system or rigid class structure with royalty and an aristocracy with all the titles attached and systems set in place to keep their great great great great great grandchildren wealthy without having to work an honest day in their life. Because of this, there is always hope that and seeing how far our ancestors have come from where they started.
I will not lie, I have had disagreements with my country's policies and still do to this day. I do not like all the Presidents from FDR to Obama promoting Free Trade and Globalization at the expense of the blue collar American worker, which reverberates into a loss of a living wage tax base for the public sector to live and operate off of. I do not like our interventionism in countries such as Iraq when we should have, 20 years ago, been heavily investing in Green technologies to extricate ourselves from the Middle East.
That being said, we do those things because every society from the beginning of mankind has been ruled in the background by those with the most wealth, hence the most power. Wealth greases the political system to an unhealthy degree where the desires of the few are placed over the desires of the many. As a realist, I do not deny this, but that does not mean I like it or have to like it.
Anyways, off on too many tangents there.
Thank you hasanwhy for giving this opportunity.
