As citizens from across the globe visit American shores for the World Cup competition, hundreds of thousands praise the United States while lambasting their media for lying. In more ways than one, they are seeing the real America for the first time: Its sights and scenery, its stores and stadiums, and most of all, its people. It has been love at first sight.
Listening to the heart-warming testimonies of foreign tourists visiting the country is edifying and unifying in a time of slanted media coverage. Europeans in particular have been fed a false narrative about America’s crime-infested culture and crass capitalist economy. The fact that these good people are believing what they see, not what they’ve heard, suggests the miracle of America is obvious to just about anyone who takes an honest look — even Americans.
But are the eyes of our friendly visitors fully open, or are they failing to see the most important realities about our country? America’s history, people, and founding principles are the realities that make everything they now love about this country possible.
The collective enthusiasm on social media hits three main topics. The first is an overall awe-struck reaction to America’s material richness, bigness, and consumer choices.
Visitors can’t get enough of our stores and restaurants, our big homes and big trucks. Even our infrastructure impresses them. All this, of course, reflects America’s great wealth. But where does that wealth and prosperity come from?
Then there is the reaction to the overwhelming beauty of America’s outdoors. The mind-blowing scenery of the United States is spoken about almost reverently, as though our founders had a special dispensation from Mother Nature.
The third observation these travelers make is the most revealing. They speak of how much they love the American people. Repeatedly, they gush over our friendliness, helpfulness, kindness, and generosity, on a scale so natural and personal that many felt they were more at home in America than in their own country. They felt they weren’t just accepted, they were encouraged!
One English lady hit the bullseye when she noted Americans’ positive attitude: “At home, I’m always having to shrink myself. In America, I’m told to ‘go for it!’” She felt liberated.
That says it all. Most anywhere you go in the world, people are accustomed to being under the thumb of civil authority and having to seek permission from government to pursue their dreams and live their lives. They navigate through an army of dim-witted bureaucrats who invent a thousand different ways to say “no.”
Then they come to America, and hear the words, “Go for it!” Take initiative! Follow your dreams! Imagine the possible! You can do it! That is the spirit of a free nation. The language of a free people. And they love it. It’s contagious. They want to stay.
The lesson our foreign friends should learn is that America’s heart and soul has very little to do with our fast food and fast cars, our mega-houses and mega-stores. All the glitz and glow that attracts their attention is but an image of free-market capitalism, which bears witness to the freedom that produced it — the freedom to try, the freedom to succeed, the freedom to fail and try again.
Historically, that freedom is grounded in faith, and in a Declaration of Independence that sets us apart from the rest of the world. When Jefferson penned those immortal words, “endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights …,” he and the signers all knew they were establishing a new kind of country under God. The rights and liberties of the individual citizen were recognized as “natural,” inalienable and inviolate, precisely because they are granted by the Great Lawmaker, not by man. No man or man’s government can alter or overturn them.
Our Constitution spells this out in detail, limiting the power and prerogatives of civil government. It was this foundation upon which the American Experiment was built and has thrived for 250 years. Our friendly visitors are seeing the thriving. They need most of all to see the foundation. Men do best when left free. And that freedom must be secure, not conditional to the next election.
Freedom without virtue or faith is a chair without legs. It’s just temporary, state-granted privileges, not freedom. The nations of the world testify to the folly and failure of unrestrained government substituted for God. America stands alone on a foundation of faith-based freedom. We Americans, more than anything, need to relearn our history and rediscover the fundamental truths that made — and will keep — us both great and free.
