My first visit to London in 1983 came the year after “E.T., the Extra Terrestrial” captured the world’s imagination.
One day, the movie came up in a discussion with a friend and I asked what impressed Europeans the most about it. He did not say the cute alien or even the depiction of American suburban life.
He said it was Elliott, the free-spirited preteen who finds and befriends E.T.
European kids are not like him at all, he said. They don’t talk like Elliott, they don’t think like Elliott, they don’t act like Elliott.
That’s what comes to mind as the United States reaches its 250th anniversary as a nation.
This nation is not great because it can wipe civilization from the planet. This nation is not great because it’s sinfully wealthy. This nation is not great because the world sings our songs.
All these great things emanate from a people who are imbued with the spirit that permeates Elliott, his annoying little sister, his big brother and all their bike-riding friends.
It’s a misnomer to call our modus operandi “The American Dream.” Dreams are accidental – they happen in our sleep when we’re not conscious, and they’re randomly infiltrated by the thoughts we have in the course of a day.
What we aspire to is a victory for the American imagination. It’s what we think about when we’re wide awake. When a young woman opens a nail parlor in Pittsburgh, or a kid is turned on by the sound of a trumpet in Iowa, or a boy or girl watches the Knicks’ ticker-tape and imagines making the winning shot in a championship game.
We get that imagination from the fact that we’re not all the same. We were one of the first countries to be that way. We started out with settlers from England, slaves from Africa and people already on the land who thought they were just sharing it – not giving it away.
Eventually we added folks from other parts of Europe. Including my ancestors from Italy. Then people from Asia with visions of sending gold back to their hometowns. People from the Middle East and from the countries south of us that were predominantly a mix of Spanish and indigenous.
All with the same idea. Making a better life. Working hard and sacrificing so that your kids, your grandkids and generations you couldn’t imagine were prosperous and at peace.
And happy. Happiness is embodied in our DNA – its pursuit is in the second paragraph of our Declaration with a capital H. It was one of the first – if not the first – expression of that idea, that achieving happiness is an inalienable right from our creator. Whoever or whatever we think that creator may be.
Because our motto is “E Pluribus Unum,” – out of many, one – we created the blueprint for raising the standards of the world. We created or perfected technological marvels, from the telegraph to the Internet. We cured diseases that were the scourge of the planet.
We went to the damn moon!
We’re not the only nation with such pedigree. It’s Canada Day as I write this, a day to celebrate the independence of our nation who shares a lot of our values but comes up with things as different as poutine and Joni Mitchell.
When I returned to Britain two years ago, I noticed the food was better. A lot better than my first trip 40 years prior. Then I looked around and saw that the diversity that makes America great is making the U.K. great as well. It’s happening throughout the world – the spreading of ideas as people seek better lives in places where they weren’t necessarily born.
Are we perfect? Hell, no! Not close. We took a break after slavery, then enforced Jim Crow laws that took nearly 100 years to unravel. We took more and more land from the people who were already here, disregarding the care with which they stewarded this beautiful land. We specifically told people from China, through a law naming them, that we didn’t want them here.
We didn’t let women vote until my grandmother’s lifetime. We didn’t let people of the same sex marry until this century.
And there are those among us who have no idea what the country is really about. They think this is some white Christian theocracy and have no clue how much Frederick Douglass and Wong Kim Ark and Tito Puente made America what it is.
When the Supreme Court ruled this week – way too narrowly, by the way – that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, they railed about some fallacy called birth tourism. As if people coming here to escape tyranny and poverty all have some sinister design to deprive Americans of something, instead of helping grow our abundance.
As I said, we’re not perfect. But it’s also in our DNA to try to be. In the preamble of our Constitution, we talk about forming a more perfect union. Not a perfect one. A more perfect one.
Elliott probably wasn’t thinking about all this when he helped E.T. go home. All he did was let his friend use the phone.
But it’s in the spirit of that goodness that we find the better America, the more perfect America we seek. We embrace the people around us and join forces to conquer – not other people, but challenges and innovations.
It’s the thing we’ve done well for 250 years as of Saturday, And if we remember the sense of wonder that Americans inspire – whether it’s in Europe or whatever planet E.T. came from – we can endure as a great nation for as long as there’s a planet to call home.
SUBJECTISM 