Blue Republican: "Why I Shall Become An American"

[robink]

"I have long been an American patriot. When I take my citizenship oath, I'll not be becoming an American at all: I'll be simply declaring that I was one all along." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner/why-i-shall-become-an-ame_b_4590202.html)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner/why-i-shall-become-an-ame_b_4590202.html (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-koerner/why-i-shall-become-an-ame_b_4590202.html)

[Occam's Banana]

Excellent article.

An interesting excerpt:

Stuck on an L.A. freeway in 2005, I was listening to NPR, when an interview came on with Greg Palast, a celebrated American journalist and author who moved to the U.K. when he realized that his investigative work was not getting the air-time it deserved in the U.S.. During the interview, Palast was asked whether he wanted to bring up his newly born children in England -- the country where he had built a life and highly successful career -- or in the United States -- the country of his birth.

He answered unhesitatingly that he wanted to bring them up in the U.S. Asked for a reason, he ventured that in the U.K. the average person knows a lot more than the average American about what is wrong with their political system and how their leaders and money-masters abuse them and their country, but they have an apathy and cynicism that prevent them from getting very exercised about it: they don't care because they expect to be screwed, he said; they therefore are resigned to compromised rights and the incompetent, over-reaching or self-interested wielding of governmental authority.

In the U.S., on the other hand, said Palast, people are much more ignorant of all these things, but were they to know, they'd be much more angry, and therefore more likely to exercise their popular power to change things, since Americans have ideals, and more importantly, believe not only in the possibility of those ideals' being practically realized, but in the requirement that they be so.