AMERICA

Do you want to know what I like about America? I assume you do, if you are still reading this second sentence. You could've bailed right out, but you are hanging in there. Look how you've made it to the fourth sentence in this paragraph. You must really want to know what I have to say. It's heartening, really. To think that I have said absolutely nothing whatsoever here and you are still around. I am, in fact, touched, and I will now reward your interest and patience with quite a small opinion piece.

What I like best about America is that is it all about the individual. I too am all about the individual, so this seems like a fortuitous match, that I was born here. I would just be hopeless in a country like Korea or such where the good of the group is always paramount. I think they would kick me right out or at least shun me. Maybe you haven't lived until you've had a good shunning. I wonder if the shunned get discounts or stores or anything. I bet not.

No, what I love love love about people is their delicious individuality. It is the individual we think of when we ponder over the great achievements and ideas of the world, what a single person was able to bring, make, do, think of, implement, create, etc. I think it is nothing less that grand to imagine that there are people yet to be born who will come up with music I will love, or a thoughtful little girl who will grow up to figure out how to stop the cancer scourge, or even someone who will dress in such a way as to make me go WELL, THAT'S SOMETHING I HAVE NEVER SEEN. WHOA.

America lives and breathes on this idea, the entrepreneur, the idea-man, the go-getter, and yes, the kook. If there is a way to profit from from someone's novelty, America will find it. More more more. Big bigger biggest. New newer newest. It keeps things fresh. There is no ceiling here. In other countries, if someone rises a bit too high, there's a backlash. Can't have the one thinking he's better than the others, eh? Gotta take him down a peg, set him right. I am looking at you, England. Don't deny it. You get all excited about something, then you have to kick its legs out. Shame on you, England. The class system blows. Everyone should be considered an infinitely valuable resource, no matter where they started from.

I hate restraints, authority, limits. How can you ever know what is possible? Now I do understand that we all must function as a group at times, and that authority and limits are really good and important especially in seasonal times of looting and/or riots. And you can get a whole lot of good solid work done in groups, provided people know how to function in them, know their roles. But I don't know that it will ever more the world forward in some wonderful way.

Ah, but America is a cold, cold place too. Highest highs, lowest lows. You can have prillionaires living a mile away from people who aren't doing much better than some poor beggar in Calcutta. There is not much sympathy for people who aren't busting their asses to achieve, and not much sympathy for those who are and are still not getting success. Las Vegas is such a metaphorical place, isn't it? All is possible, a very few get it, some get something, and most get nothing. A few lose it all.

But still. I celebrate a place where at your birth the possibility exists for you to be YOU, whatever that is, and fly however high you want to fly. This is a tough place in a lot of ways, but it can bring out a lot of good. The idea that you can think what you want, do what you want to do as long as you aren't messing up someone else and their doings, seems somehow very compassionate to me. It celebrates each person, lets them know that they were important enough to form a great country around, that they mattered. America should always strive to remember to protect the individual, and to remember that some kind of greatness lies in us all, if allowed to be nurtured and set free. It is a tremendously complex endeavor, but of the highest honor and worth.

I appreciate you hanging in there to this, the last paragraph of this blog entry written on a chilly evening in winter, from the Pacific Northwest, by me, an American woman, all free and shit.