I Like Being American: Treasured Traditions, Symbols, and Stories - Hardcover

Leach, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385507437 ISBN 13: 9780385507431

Publisher: Doubleday, 2003

Synopsis

A stirring celebration of a nation rich in diversity and united by an indestructible belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A feast of heartwarming true stories, thought-provoking essays, and eye-opening observations, I Like Being American captures the love, loyalty, and gratitude that inspires and sustains Americans in good times and in bad. It is about what is beautiful, true, and lasting in our country, and it is sure to lift your spirit, and encourage all of us to live up to our deepest ideals.

The contributors range from such well-known figures as novelist Anna Quindlen, who celebrates our unity in diversity, to Dinesh D’Souza who learned that in America he could write the story of his own life, to immigrants from every corner of the earth who express profound gratitude for their new homeland. Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American senator, and Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, share their pride in how far America has come in its brief history. The values Americans treasure come to life in the first-person stories of “ordinary people” such as Dan O’Neill, who founded Mercy Corps to help share America’s abundance with those less fortunate throughout the world. A guest list of celebrities as diverse as Colin Powell, Jimmy Carter, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Marianne Williamson, Paul Simon, Bill O’Reilly, and Yogi Berra reveals a nation built on foundations of freedom, equality, and compassion.

The spiritual foundations of the nation come to life in historic documents and inspiring speeches–including the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s letter from a Birmingham jail.

A book of great spirit and generosity, just like the land it portrays, I Like Being American showcases in words and pictures why 300 million people of every age, religion, ethnicity, and race are proud to say with one voice: “I like being American!”

About this title

About the Author

Michael Leach is the publisher of Orbis Books. A past president and publisher of the Crossroad/Continuum Publishing Group, he has edited and published more than a thousand books, including numerous award-winners. His own books include I Like Being Married and the bestseller I Like Being Catholic, coedited with Therese J. Borchard. He lives in Connecticut.

From the Inside Flap

elebration of a nation rich in diversity and united by an indestructible belief in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

A feast of heartwarming true stories, thought-provoking essays, and eye-opening observations, I Like Being American captures the love, loyalty, and gratitude that inspires and sustains Americans in good times and in bad. It is about what is beautiful, true, and lasting in our country, and it is sure to lift your spirit, and encourage all of us to live up to our deepest ideals.

The contributors range from such well-known figures as novelist Anna Quindlen, who celebrates our unity in diversity, to Dinesh D Souza who learned that in America he could write the story of his own life, to immigrants from every corner of the earth who express profound gratitude for their new homeland. Carol Moseley-Braun, the first African-American senator, and Madeleine Albright, the first female secretary of state, share their pride in how far America

Reviews

Leach, co-editor of I Like Being Catholic (2000) and I Like Being Married (2002), provides another collection in the same passionate vein. In this one he combines a host of anecdotes, essays, quotations, observations, speeches, and illustrations into one spectacular paean of praise to America. While attempting to identify what is best about this nation and what makes us all uniquely American, he has gathered the humorous, heartfelt, and stirring reflections of both this nation's idols and its ordinary citizens. Thematic elements that bind these individual visions together are the qualities that true Americans treasure most: courage, creativity, opportunity, perseverance, equality, and freedom. A treasure trove of Americanisms and Americana. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

The American Family

E pluribus unum--out of many, one.
--Motto on the Great Seal of the United States

There are birds of many colors--red, blue, green, yellow--yet it is all one bird. There are horses of many colors--brown, black, yellow, white--yet it is all one horse. So cattle, so all living things--animals, flowers, trees. So men: in this land where once were only Indians are now men of every color--white, black, yellow, red--yet all one people. That this should come to pass was in the heart of the Great Mystery. It is right thus. And everywhere there shall be peace.
--Hiamovi (High Chief) Chief of Cheyennes and Dakotas

The Indian Book

Americans are not a single ethnic group.

Americans are not of one race or one religion.

Americans emerge from all your nations.

We are defined as Americans by our beliefs--not by our ethnic origins, our race, or our religion. Our beliefs in religious freedom, political freedom, and economic freedom--that's what makes an American. Our belief in democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human life--that's how you become an American. It is these very principles--and the opportunities these principles give to so many to create a better life for themselves and their families--that make America, and New York, "a shining city on a hill."

There is no nation, and no city, in the history of the world that has seen more immigrants, in less time, than America. People continue to come here in large numbers to seek freedom, opportunity, decency, and civility.

Each of your nations--I am certain--has contributed citizens to the United States and to New York. I believe I can take every one of you someplace in New York City, where you can find someone from your country, someone from your village or town, that speaks your language and practices your religion. In each of your lands there are many who are Americans in spirit, by virtue of their commitment to our shared principles.
--Mayor Rudy Giuliani
United Nations General Assembly
October 1, 2001

America is not like a blanket--one piece of unbroken cloth, the same color, the same texture, the same size. America is more like a quilt--many patches, many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all woven and held together by a common thread. The white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arab, the Jew, the woman, the Native American, the small farmer, the businessperson, the environmentalist, the peace activist, the young, the old, the lesbian, the gay, and the disabled make up the American quilt.
--Jesse Jackson, American human rights activist

A Quilt of a Country By Anna Quindlen

America is an improbable idea, a mongrel nation built of ever-changing disparate parts, it is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone. "Of all the nations in the world, the United States was built in nobody's image," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. That's because it was built of bits and pieces that seem discordant, like the crazy quilts that have been one of its great folk-art forms, velvet and calico and checks and brocades. Out of many, one. That is the ideal.

The reality is often quite different, a great national striving consisting frequently of failure. Many of the oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other. Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of the lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, the murder of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to "crown thy good with brotherhood," that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful. Perhaps they understand it at this moment [in the aftermath of 9/11], when enormous tragedy, as it so often does, demands a time of reflection on enormous blessings.

This is a nation founded on a conundrum, what Mario Cuomo has characterized as "community added to individualism." These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict. Historians today bemoan the ascendancy of a kind of prideful apartheid in America, saying that the clinging to ethnicity, in background and custom, has undermined the concept of unity. These historians must have forgotten the past, or have gilded it. The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so, than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue. (I was the product of a mixed marriage, across barely bridgeable lines: an Italian girl, an Irish boy. How quaint it seems now, how incendiary then.) The Brooklyn of Francie Nolan's famous tree, the Newark of which Portnoy complained, even the uninflected WASP suburbs of Cheever's characters: they are ghettoes, pure and simple. Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of Massachusetts a century ago? You know the answer.

What is the point of this splintered whole? What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York--and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? What is the point of a nation in which one part seems to be always on the verge of fisticuffs with another, blacks and whites, gays and straights, left and right, Pole and Chinese and Puerto Rican and Slovenian? Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.

Once these disparate parts were held together by a common enemy, by the fault lines of world wars and the electrified fence of communism. With the end of the cold war there was the creeping concern that without a focus for hatred and distrust, a sense of national identity would evaporate, that the left side of the hyphen--African-American, Mexican-American, Irish-American--would overwhelm the right. And slow-growing domestic traumas like economic unrest and increasing crime seemed more likely to emphasize division than community. Today the citizens of the United States have come together once more because of armed conflict and enemy attack. Terrorism has led to devastation--and unity.

Yet even in 1994, the overwhelming majority of those surveyed by the National Opinion Research Center agreed with this statement: "The U.S. is a unique country that stands for something special in the world." One of the things that it stands for is this vexing notion that a great nation can consist entirely of refugees from other nations, that people of different, even warring religions and cultures can live, if not side by side, then on either side of the country's Chester Avenues. Faced with this diversity there is little point in trying to isolate anything remotely resembling a national character, but there are two strains of behavior that, however tenuously, abet the concept of unity.

There is the Calvinist undercurrent in the American psyche that loves the difficult, the demanding, that sees mastering the impossible, whether it be prairie or subway, as a test of character, and so glories in the struggle of this fractured coalescing. And there is a grudging fairness among the citizens of the United States that eventually leads most to admit that, no matter what the English-only advocates try to suggest, the new immigrants are not so different from our own parents or grandparents. Leonel Castillo, former director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and himself the grandson of Mexican immigrants, once told the writer Studs Terkel proudly, "The old neighborhood Ma-Pa stores are still around. They are not Italian or Jewish or Eastern European any more. Ma and Pa are now Korean, Vietnamese, Iraqi, Jordanian, Latin American. They live in the store. They work seven days a week. Their kids are doing well in school. They're making it. Sound familiar?"

Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested. Pride seems excessive, given the American willingness to endlessly complain about them, them being whoever is new, different, unknown, or currently under suspicion. But patriotism is partly taking pride in this unlikely ability to throw all of us together in a country that across its length and breadth is as different as a dozen countries, and still be able to call it by one name. When photographs of the faces of all those who died in the World Trade Center destruction are assembled in one place, it will be possible to trace in the skin color, the shape of the eyes and the noses, the texture of the hair, a map of the world. These are the representatives of a mongrel nation that somehow, at times like this, has one spirit. Like many improbable ideas, when it actually works, it's a wonder.
--Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, is the author of the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life and three acclaimed novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue.

Chicago is a city of neighborhoods. Mine was Polish American. It wasn't until I went to high school that I met and became friends with Irish, German, Italian, Lithuanian, and other Americans with roots in foreign lands.

I was ordained a Catholic priest in 1966 and have spent the rest of my life serving in an African American community. It's on the other side of town of my original neighborhood and yet so very close. I could not have been made to feel more welcomed anywhere on earth.

My vision of what is good and beautiful and true has simply broadened. I grew up in one community with a particular style and expression, and have moved into another with a different style an...

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385507437
• ISBN 13: 9780385507431
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208