by Mary Wakefield Buxton –
URBANNA — Last week I wrote about my first awareness in 1963 at age 21 while looking out at the 6th fleet anchored in Naples Bay, Italy, of how fortunate I was to be born and raised in America. I shared with readers that my love for America was related to my awareness of my family’s desperate struggle to come here from England in the 19th century, which had provided my grandfather opportunities to succeed that he would never have had in England.
I’ve often reflected on my ancestors and the many millions of others who were so motivated to escape deprivation in their homelands and get to America. They wanted opportunity to break the mold of poverty and an iron clad social class system in which they had been born into in the mother country. They were willing to do anything, endure every hardship, in order to escape the lives they led and pass onto their offspring a better life.
Other American ancestors suffered even more difficult paths to citizenship. Many early Colonists came into the country as indentured servants; passage, room and board were provided for a designated term of servitude. Native Americans, already here, suffered the agony of losing their homelands and way of life to European settlers who laid claim to the new land. African Americans, enslaved and coerced into coming here, had an even more tortured start. I can’t speak of the suffering of such ancestors and their individual experiences, but I do know in spite of past cruelties of slavery, segregation and centuries of suppression, many African Americans along with native Indians have broken the chains of poverty and dependence and obtained prosperity and success in America.
I also know that my ancestors desperately wanted to live in America. They wanted what founding father, Thomas Jefferson, stated in our Declaration of Independence … the right of … “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” When the new republic broke its fetters from England in 1776 and declared its independence, it offered the world hope for a new way of life in a world of individual freedom.
Thus, America attracted industrious, motivated, hard-working people perhaps like a magnet right from the very beginning. These sturdy, energetic immigrants who came to our shores with new ideas determined to succeed and mixing with our free enterprise system created a kind of ongoing “brain bomb” that just kept exploding over and over again creating jobs and wealth for the blossoming new nation.
Over the generations this force of energy just kept “exploding,” so to speak, continuing to produce new wealth and new jobs. In such an environment many inventions came about in every field soon making our nation the wealthiest and most powerful in the world. The thrilling part was these ongoing “bursts” created a large middle class population able to take care of itself and live independently from government.
Some Americans today feel left out of this explosion of wealth and for good reason. We have to find a way to spread the prosperity we have earned through hard work but do so in a way that does not kill incentive and motivation. Unreasonable taxation of high producers does just that. Ask yourself what limits would you have if the money you earn from your labor was taken from you and given to others? We have to find the right balance or we will lose our magic ingredient to our nation’s success.
Societies fail because government suppresses the natural gifts and talents of its people. Not just some of the people need to be free and motivated to succeed, but all of the people. Our nation’s history teaches us that literally everyone alive today in America has descended from ancestors who were suppressed one way or another at one time or another in history.
Whatever reforms lie ahead, we must hold onto individual freedom. Think of our free society that offers opportunities for all as a pan of boiling water, constantly emitting a source of energy rather than what a totalitarian society offers that holds back its citizens … a stagnant pond covered in scum and with little signs of life.
It’s thrilling living in a society like the United States which comes up with new ideas, inventions and even cures for diseases on a daily basis. As an example, how exciting to see the amazing speed in which new treatments are being developed to treat COVID-19. I’m so proud of this nation as it moves toward our goal of possibly saving the entire world with a good, old “made in the U.S.A.” vaccine!
May we always work and live in a world where the individual is free! May we find ways to provide all citizens motivation and equal opportunities for success to achieve what human beings the world over still so passionately crave … “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness!”
© 2020
