Submitted by Don Carlson, Jul 10, 2007 23:51

I approve of Mr. Gittel's sentiment that America has a special being--or had, but it will not do to speak grandly and vaguely of American values; they must be stated succinctly, clearly, definedly in order to be more than eyewash to both our enemies and our children. The quote from Theodore Roosevelt, "we all work together, heart, hand, and head, for the honor and the greatness of our common country," has neither clarity nor eloquence. It is fine to call for concerted effort as long as that effort is one of individuals, each following his conscience, and not that of a mob, of the obedient, ever-hopeful-of-perfection, politically correct collective that our leftist friends hope to bring into being in America's place. Try this: The American founders' idea was that a radical kind of personal liberty consisting of freedom from enforced conformity in religion and social norms; freedom of entrepreneurial enterprise and ownership; freedom to maintain the means of self-defense and resistance to abusive authority; freedom to gather together to conjure up, discuss, and disagree over political conflicts; freedom to live according to their individual precepts of good, so long as that did not impinge on others' similar rights; equality before the law; and, most obviously, freedom to install and remove persons from authority according to the will of the majority—they believed that all this would make for a different and better world. In short, the idea of America was, and should be now, that the individual citizen is the essential element of society and lends his singular qualities and energies to the cumulative project that is human destiny, and that this is each person's right and responsibility.

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