Troubles in the Land of Freedom

by Farid Ghadry

It’s hard to imagine a country with more influence on fashioning individual liberties and freedom over the last 300 hundred years than the United States. This nation of immigrants, preachers, farmers, and undesirables under the old British societal hierarchies has ignited, with words and ideas, an empyrean Renaissance the likes of which humanity has never witnessed in its short history. If Florence illuminated Europe with its knowledge, arts, and humanities, America flickered the kindred spirits of men whose celestial freedom became the cornerstone of a nation.

But the United States, if one watches the success it had in defeating communism and in spreading its culture based on individual freedom, is experiencing a disturbing metamorphosis disconnecting its people from the very enabling roots of its greatness. Freedom, as a priority, no longer sets the agenda because of fiscal pressures but more importantly because the enemies of freedom have succeeded, either through terror or through influence peddling, in diminishing the US capacity to fight for freedom. Those inexpensive IED‘s were directly responsible for deaths and a psychological warfare to demoralize America; but they also indirectly provoked more defensive military spending; money we could have saved.

Presently, the American public-at-large has neither the appetite nor the will to see the US interfere in Syria even if boots on the ground are not required. US voters look at Syria from a fiscal point of view and not a humanitarian angle and they want no part in helping for fear it may yet cost them, the taxpayers, more billions than necessary.

Add to these fiscal concerns a social equation very few American-Syrians take into consideration dealing with how Americans view Muslim countries because of the hate for America and the west in general. The US has helped Muslims around the globe yet the venom against American culture and American democracy is incessant. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, instead of thanking US Aid for the sewer system in Cairo that cost US taxpayers billions, they attack America and call it the Great Satan. Moreover, Muslims attack the US at home and abroad, with weapons, words, and ideas; so Americans ask themselves a very practical question: Why should we help any Muslim country embrace freedom or why should we assist Muslim countries with foreign aid they are ungrateful for? These ideas provide solace to those foreign governments most enemies to the US but Americans see it from a different prism.

If the disconnect from the freedom agenda is strictly related to national debt and fiscal responsibility then America will take center stage again when it comes to the very cornerstone of its foundation, but if the freedom agenda is being shelved in favor of less freedom or an approach more cognizant of other civilizations or systems of government then we should be deeply concerned with or without the on-going civil war in Syria. At the end of the day, most of us first generation immigrants escaped the Arab region because of tyranny and cronyism, corruption and favoritism; our antennas are up before anyone else’s when freedom leaves the room and we take concerns over freedom very seriously because almost all us have suffered the indignities of tyranny and so fighting for freedom comes naturally. As naturally as breathing oxygen is.

Farid Ghadry

Source: http://ghadry.com/2012/03/24/troubles-in-the-land-of-freedom/

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