EVEN as most of us strive to send our children to either settle in the US or study there, we are slowly developing an anger towards that country. Maybe it’s because of a visa refusal, and I’m not going into anyone who didn’t get one, or it could be opportunities the US citizen has that we don’t have here.
I believe that most of it, world over, is due to envy. Yes, we are envious about it being the richest country in the world, and an infrastructure that lends itself to a comfortable lifestyle. “Why should they have it all?” we ask enviously.
To those who think such, I would like them to come with me to Ellis Island. Ellis Island is just off Manhattan and can be reached by a boat. This was the island where ships bringing immigrants had to dock, and the immigrants checked for visa and illness before being allowed onto the mainland.
I picked up the numerous phones inside the museum that had voices of those who had been recorded years back, talking of the travel they’d made across the seas from Ireland, England, China, and other countries. The voices spoke about the penniless state they were in and the abject poverty in the homelands they’d left that had driven them here.
The voices were desperate, lacking confidence maybe, but, burning with determination. And it’s that determination that drove them to do well. They did well and they were taxed for doing well, and the money from their taxes was not used to give free TVs for voters, but went into building railroads, subway metros, airports, bridges, and a thousand other facilities that would make the building of businesses and work-life easier.
They toiled hard, fought hard, sometimes lonely battles with barbaric natives and finally emerged victorious. With that came also the fight for freedoms, that of slavery, equality through civil right movements and constant guarding of liberties. And with all things good, comes the bad especially when freedom is available. But the rest of the world loves to focus on the bad, especially when it comes from a feeling of envy and quite often rejection, like I said, in the refusal of a visa.
Hating the US is not going to help us build our country. What we have to see is a democracy that’s worked, and realize that we as a democracy have the same opportunities to make success work here, because we share the same democratic principles.
For this we need to stop listening to hate mongers who lean towards a bully like Russia, and instead want those same opportunities right here in our own country that we push our children to get when we make them stand in line outside the US embassy. Our country can become as great or greater, but we need to stop our envy, and start emulating a successful model…!
