“To some generations, much is given. From others, much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny!” President Franklin D. Roosevelt
I understand that the news in America these days is almost all negative. More plant closings. More people getting laid off. More foreclosures. More national debt. Nary a bit of good news anywhere.
Yet living outside the United States, and looking back on America from 7,000 miles away, I've come to a conclusion: from here, it seems that America can do anything.
We all know that America is going through tough times, very tough. It's clearly the worst economic period in America since the Great Depression. We had the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history, an administration that in eight years ran up $5 trillion in debt. And what did we get for it?
And we had companies loaning money to people who couldn't pay the money back. In normal times, those companies would fail, and rightly so. If a company disregards the risk involved in a business transaction, it deserves to go bankrupt, but we can't have every company go under all at once, so now we're borrowing money to solve a problem created by people and the government borrowing too much money. It is a terrible situation.
Yet we Americans know that America will solve this problem. We just don't know when. That's the way we are in America. Solving problems is what we do, and I think that – even with all our faults – we're better at it than anyone else in the world. Just look at what we've done in the recent past.
Send men to the moon? Can do! In 1961, we hadn't sent a person into space. Eight years later, we landed on the moon. That was 40 years ago, and how many other countries have tried and succeeded since? Zero.
Or look at how we sent Apollo 13 towards the moon and had an oxygen tank explode. We scrambled and worked against a rapidly ticking time clock that showed that the astronauts were going to run out of oxygen and die if our engineers and scientists didn't come up with a solution, and pronto? Yeah, we solved that. Brought them home safely.
Fly a plane into a flock of birds at takeoff, blow out both engines, land the plane in the Hudson River, and save every person on board, and the plane? You bet we can do that.
I think that if you've never traveled overseas and talked to the people who live there, it is difficult to understand just what America means to the world. For the vast majority of the people on earth, America stands for something good, and it really has nothing to do with our wealth or our military power. It has everything to do with the ideals that we have, the ones that we started with, and first among those are three simple words: “Land of Opportunity.”
America is, was, and probably always will be the Land of Opportunity. Why do you think all those millions of immigrants have come to America, and keep coming to America? It's because in America, you have the chance to make something of yourself. If you have an idea, and if you're willing to work, you can do ... anything.
How many other places on earth have seen multi-national corporations started in somebody's garage in America? That's how Apple Computers, Hewlett-Packard and others came to light.
How many other nations would embrace refugees hanging precariously to a raft, with all their possessions in the world inside tiny suitcases, and then watch as those refugees became successful in America, their children often becoming scholars at prestigious universities. Vietnamese Boat People, take a bow.
In how many other countries could a boy of mixed races, raised in a home without the father, with no real advantages in the world except for the ones that really count – a loving mother and grandparents, the capacity to work hard, and the audacity to dream big dreams – work his way through college and law school and become President of these United States? President Obama, we honor your journey.
Multiply those success stories by 100 million or so over the years, and that's the story of America. We embrace people who are problem solvers and who aren't afraid to fail repeatedly – as Abraham Lincoln did – to follow their own stars because we know that, in the end, it will work out for them. That's the way it is in America.
At dinner one time with the father of an Brazilian exchange student who had lived with us for a year, I was startled to hear what he had to say. This was a man who owned an apartment directly across the street from the classiest beach in Rio, and a house in the mountains that was magnificent, and with a driver, a cook, and assorted maids and other minders. In a lot of countries in South America, it seems that you either have a maid or you are a maid, and there isn't a lot in between, and this man was in the thin crust of the wealthy. He had it made. Yet he said that he hoped that his kids would come to America when they were grown. Why? “It's the Land of Opportunity,” he said.
As many problems as America has right now, there are still millions of people who would give anything to come to America and to obtain something precious: American citizenship, and all the rights and privileges that involves.
We will solve this economic problem by going back to some core values: thrift, hard work, and the idea that we need to leave the country better off than when we found it.
There is another quote that always resonates with me. It's so American. It was when Alan Shepherd was getting ready to become the first American to take a rocket into space on a little 15 minute ride in 1961. The scientists and engineers were all scared because American rockets of that era had a tendency to blow up, and they didn't want to blow up the first American scheduled to go into space, especially on live TV. So they checked everything over and over again, and waited and waited until finally, Shepherd had had enough.
“Look,” he said, “I'm cooler than you are. You fix your little problem and light this candle!”
That sums up America, doesn't it? It did then, and it will now. We're going to fix this little problem. And we're going to light this candle.
