I love to visit England and would be delighted to visit other European countries. However, this fondness for sojourning in Europe in order to drink from the abundant fountains of history is markedly distinct from a desire for the U.S. to become England’s twin.
If my recollection of history is correct, there was a time when a band of hoi polloi fled the motherland, risking life, liberty, and security, and set sail to pursue a better life on a new continent. These seemingly insignificant pilgrims and Puritans established a nation that by the grace of God has become the wealthiest, freest, and most powerful nation the world has ever known.
From these humble beginnings, the United States of America has been richly blessed by God and the envy of the world. Much of the genius of America was/is the antithesis of the institutions of Western Europe. England and all of Europe believed that centralized government was the hallmark of civilized sophisticates.
In stark contrast, these adventurers sought a world where government’s power was limited to a few essentials and existed for “we the people”. The oceanic distance between the motherland and their new home was only exceeded in comparison by the religious distance they established between the two. Even the English language of America is notably distinct from that of our Englander friends. Freedom, both Christian and political, is the gift of America to the modern world.
Now, with heretofore unparalled zeal, President Obama has taken up the “Europe is grander” baton and leads an omnium-gatherum of liberals, secularists, illegal or unassimilated immigrants, and progressives in their vibrant penchant for Europeanizing America. I’m quite sure that if they could, they would liefly drain the pond that separates us so that we could all be ideologically and continentally one.
Obama seems quite ashamed of American exceptionality, the blessings granted the world by America’s military might, and our generosity to never-ending world crises, and he is conversely enamored with the idea that government is the best determiner and distributor of wealth. I know the idea of purchasing governmental security from the difficulty of life at the expense of personal freedom and responsibility is fashionable in Europe, but has he forgotten that our former departure from England was a repudiation of that concept, or is he just as ashamed of our forefathers as he apparently is of us?
The pilgrimatic departure of our Founders shouted to the world “there is a better way”, and the world has taken note, which is evidenced by the multitudes of immigrants from every hamlet in the world forsaking security for the better life with their own pilgrimatic journey.
Thus, why now instead of all Europe looking to the U.S., are so many in the U.S. looking to Europe as the model of exceptionality? The European ideas esteemed by President Obama include parasitical socialism, military weakness, border vulnerability without the U.S. military protecting them, Darwinian secularism, economic decline, and subjugation of nationalism to globalism under the governance of the United Nations or the European Union or some such denationalizing watchful eye.
I suggest that although the United States is clearly not the empyrean where God dwells, it is as our forefathers believed a little closer than Europe. We dare not take for granted what cost others so much, lest our children awaken in a land we know not.
