Why it is easy to be great in America?

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Chapter Four: It is easy to be great in America

It is easy to be great in America, because you have opportunity. Just 200 years ago and further back in history, if I were a blacksmith, you would most likely be a blacksmith. If I were a peasant, you would be a peasant. Whatever your father was, you would become.

It is not that way anymore; you can be anything you want to be. While all of your goals and wishes might not come true, you don’t have to be your father. You can study, learn, grow and develop into something you want to be.

We have gone through periods in our history that allow us this freedom and growth.

In the beginning we believed things because we did not have the knowledge to believe otherwise. Our leaders gave us what we should think, and we thought it for the most part.

We believed the world was flat, and the earth revolved around the sun.

We believed not long ago that using leeches to extract blood would cure us of disease.

In 1899 Mr. Charles Duell, the commissioner of the U.S. Patents said, “Everything that has been invented, has been invented.” He said we should close the Patent office down to save the taxpayers money.

Since 1899, a lot of things have been invented. Things your grandmother has seen since she was born in 1908: cars, highways, television sets, computers, search engines--and this is just the beginning. Inventions are going to be coming at us faster and faster as our world knowledge continues to increase. No longer will people be uninformed if they choose, because of technology and the communication options these channels create. Ideas continue to spread, whether leaders want them to or not. Technology communication will continue to expand and broaden and invade our minds with new concepts and ideas.

People are attracted to new inventions and technologies. Your Great-Grandfather Everett was a gadget freak. Everett would bring home gadgets all of the time. He was fascinated by new inventions, even though at that time it might be a machine peeling carrots, or a radio with numbered station dials. He was the first on his block to have this thing called an automobile.

It is easy to be great in America, because a significant amount of people don’t read books after high school. The average American that does read, only reads one or two books a year. The average American family only makes $45,000 a year. The average American cannot run around the block.

Yet this is significantly more than a large portion of the rest of the world. In many places there are no books, there are no economic possibilities like you in America have.

We live in a special place in the world and should recognize what we have to work with in creating a special life.

How easy is it to be great in America? Read more than a few books a year, make more than $45,000 a year, and run around the block a couple times, and you become more than average.

Only about 7% of Americans make more than $75,000 a year. If earning money, keeping your mind alive with reading, and running around the block make you great, it should be easy for you to achieve whatever you would like to achieve.

It is easy to be great in America.

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Comment by Henry Piarrot on June 27, 2009 at 1:01pm: I am an American

I am the grandson of a Choctaw Indian man who married a German woman and a Frenchman that married a Mexican senorita. After explaining this to a young college student in Nashville about a decade ago, she looked at me totally perplexed and asked, “Well, if there was a world war, which would you fight for?” Once the shock of her bizarre question subsided, I replied, “I am an American.”

A couple of years later, a young history major came to my tavern one afternoon proclaiming that his professor presented undisputable evidence to his class that “the American Dream was nothing more than a myth.” He added, “The American Dream was simply a ruse devised by the ruling class to keep the poor working to make the rich richer with no real hope of actually becoming rich themselves.” Once I digested the potential harm of the lesson to a seeming bright individual, I suggested to him that he return to school the next day and quit. “After all, you are going to college because you have a dream that requires credentials.” I said, “If yours is an impossible dream, why go thru the pain and sacrifice earning a degree requires? Do your parents a favor and stop wasting their money. They worked hard for it.”

Life did not allow me to go to college and for many years as a young adult, I thought I had missed out. However, I am an American and when his crazy professor angrily came to see me the next day to scold me for “poisoning the mind” of his student, I realized what I had missed most was the brainwashing of some who place their politics above the futures of their students. Needless to say, I sent that so called educator back to his office with his tail between his legs.

Searching for freedom of religion after having been persecuted for their beliefs, the American Dream was first sought by those who left everything they had and risked their lives to find it. Ultimately, terrible living conditions in Europe and the hope for political freedom in America attracted more brave people to journey to the New World . But, I am an American today because historians, poets and patriots proclaimed truths that are self evident and the armies of tyrants were no match for the forces of liberty.

James Truslow Adams first put the American Dream to words in his 1931 book The Epic of America. He wrote, "The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is a difficult dream for the European upper classes to interpret adequately, and too many of us ourselves have grown weary and mistrustful of it. It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position." I am an American because I believe these words to be as defining and powerful as any written by our founders.

Consequently, the American Dream means something different to everyone. Throughout history, great accomplishments have always started with the vision of a single individual who mustered the courage to overcome the fear of failing. I am an American because I know each achiever’s dream is the key to their vitality and defines their character, while the excitement of limitless possibility inspires us to endeavor and struggle in ways the defeatists and the excuse makers can only imagine.

With so many of our young people going off to college this fall, the last thing I want to do is to leave the impression that higher education is not important. I have 3 sons that have either been to, or are attending college and a daughter about to do the same. What I do want to impress on those who will look to their teachers for direction, is that there is a difference between an education and indoctrination. We are Americans because God has blessed us with the hard won freedom to live our dreams. Do not let anyone convince you government is your mother or that God is not your Father.

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Comment by Robert Sloan on June 27, 2009 at 12:52pm: Mel, you made a good point that most of the truly great people in the country or the world are invisible, only those who personally know them are aware of it. I don't think great lots of money is in itself greatness and I don't think fame without content is either -- after all, someone could be famous just for dating someone famous or winning pots of money or doing something that caught on as a fad.

For a long time in history, greatness was measured mostly in conquest, in being able to get up a huge gang, turn it into an army and go take over someone else's country. The more other countries, the better. This was the standard of greatness for Rome. When it's on a small scale it's crime. When it's on a national scale it gets called greatness and the loot stimulates the economy at home.

So maybe collective greatness is as easy as signing up at your local military recruiter, certainly military salaries are functionally on the high end when it comes to being able to support a family. So many basic expenses are taken care of that a soldier's income is more for savings, pleasure, capital, soldiers have a better economic situation than most.

Greatness by talent is a matter of personality and commitment. If you love what you're doing, that's when you get good at the arts -- whether that's dance, writing novels, painting, drawing, music, anything in the arts. It doesn't get taken seriously in America and there are huge social barriers to anyone becoming successful in the arts unless their parents were already successful. Nonetheless, crooked as it sometimes is, the entertainment industry is huge in America so there's opportunity in some arts. Especially those involving movies.

It boils down to what you respect in life, what you consider greatness. I think that very often true greatness can arise despite very harsh conditions although it may remain invisible as Mel pointed out. Greatness comes in being able to face your environment and your troubles without resorting to losing your ethics.

To me there is a lot of greatness in people who, in concentration camps where they knew they and everyone else would die, nonetheless shared what little food they had and helped the others. That is true greatness.

Comment by Mel Wiebe on June 27, 2009 at 12:52pm: How about being great in HEAVEN? Being great here on earth in America or Canada is one thing and important. We will only spend a few years on earth but we will spend ETERNITY in HEAVEN. Are you sure you will get there? and will you have enough 'sent' investments to be great there? You can read John 3:16 in the Bible to give you a starting point. www.melwiebe.com
Mel

Comment by Dr. Erica Goodstone on June 27, 2009 at 12:50pm: Great post. Your book looks inviting. One point of information, that old wives tale of using leeches to extract disease is back in use. Some doctors, now, in the 21st centurey are again using leeches. I think it was Demi Moore who had some sessions with leeches to keep her body youthful.

Comment by Robert Sloan on June 27, 2009 at 12:41pm: Unless you can't run around the block, or even walk around the block.

I question the idea that earning $75,000 a year is greatness. It's just wealth. My daughter is learning to become a blacksmith, a farrier who will earn in that range or higher. So maybe the blacksmiths shouldn't be equated with peasants.

Most of the people who earn $75,000 a year wouldn't think of that as financial independence either. I think the percentage of Americans who have to work two jobs in order to stay afloat -- to maintain basics like housing, utilities and food or buy down crushing debt -- is much, much higher than 7%. Working two jobs, it's not surprising a lot of them don't have time to read more than once or twice a year.

Even if greatness is defined as making a lot of money, America does not make it easy to achieve.

Greatness could be defined as fame, whether a person's remembered for what they did. Inventors sometimes get this. Other times what happens is that they had contracts with companies that left the company owning anything they invent, even at home, even if it had nothing to do with their job, if it's profitable the company is the one that owns the patent.

People in the arts can gain fame, even enduring fame. But I think that is more likely in countries friendlier to the arts.

I am not saying America is the worst place in the world, it's not by far. But I don't put it in the category of even one of the best, not with the levels of infant and maternal mortality an embarrassment to the rest of the world, not with its long history of atrocity, its long history of racism and religious prejudice, its peculiar tendency to blue laws favoring the establishment of particular churches regardless of what anyone else in the community wants.

The idea that America's a land of opportunity is part of its mythos. It's something that gets drummed in every history book and it's led on wave after wave of immigrants with the promise of eventual wealth and the reality of discrimination, bad conditions, exploitation until they get to pick on the next group.

Opportunities are created by people who choose a goal and go for it, doing what's necessary to reach it. I'm not saying there aren't worse places in the world by far, some countries are still medieval in their outlook. What opportunities people seek is also a matter of what their goals are -- it is nearly impossible in this country for someone to become a poet, to make poetry their occupation. It would be much easier in other, more intellectual countries, for a good poet to make a mark and make a living.

Comment by Ruth Shultz on June 27, 2009 at 12:40pm: Hey Mel Reed...you took more words right out of my thoughts! That little blurb is correct also.

Comment by Ruth Shultz on June 27, 2009 at 12:35pm: I agree to a great extent with Rosina, Laura and Dr. John Loblack. America has many ifs added to its Bill of Rights in these troubled times. That is, a lot depends on ones situation to begin with politically, socially and morally. Like all western countries it depends on whom we are in this society if 'nemo's' statement holds true. I personally believe that ones success depends on just how much of a fire in the belly one possesses. If one has belief in one's self all things are possible no matter where that person lives. It is just that in the Western world there are not so many barbed wire fences to jump. I am a Canadian who came here to marry my late husband who was born in American. As a Canuck living here in America, I think there are a lot of great things to appreciate as there are in my country of origin but I believe that the attainment of greatness, when all is said and done; comes down to the individual and not to the country in which they live.

Comment by Steven Raymer on June 27, 2009 at 12:34pm: It is easy to be great. Make your plan. Paste it to your bathroom mirror. Break you plan into little steps. Remember every morning that today step 6 (for example) is ready for you to act upon it! Review your plan every evening. Tomorrow morning at the bathroom mirror, move your plan forward. Get a coach if you can. Read Think and Grow Rich

Comment by Chris Smith on June 27, 2009 at 12:28pm: My mentor and and friend is from Albania and says that America is the land of opportunity and that his parents gave all they had just to get him here 10 years ago. I meet Andi 6 years ago and he had been here about four years. He had tried collage and failed and was working a pizza place delivering pizza's.

He EARNED 39k last month in our company and is the top income earner. He made more last month than he has ever made in a year. Andi says "Americans don't realize how great and free the US is and how lucky we are." Also he says 'To watch out you competition is a hungry immigrant, like me"

Fact is Andi's mother and Father gave all for him to come, so he came to the US to win, to succeed and to be prosperous. Not to be lazy, complacent or be a victim.

Find out more about Andi and my business and how a poor immigrant can make 39k in one month http://wedidyoucan.com