As Americans, we tend to think we have an advantage over adversaries when it comes to dealing with others in this old world. And, well, we do. But it hasn’t always been this way. Allow me to explain.

From its humble beginnings, America had very few advantages over the rest of the world. Europe had kings and queens, great armies and navies and millennia of history on its side.

The Far East, dominated by China and Japan, had thousands of years in the power business, as did Egypt in the Middle East on the African continent. I mean, the Washington Monument is pretty cool, but it pales when placed next to the Great Pyramid on the Giza Plateau.

However, what America had in abundance was vast areas of land, water and untaped natural resources.

You can read those last few words and dismiss them, but it can’t be stressed enough. America had vast resources none in the world ever could have envisioned.

But it was an intangible resource that would propel America from an unchartered wilderness, dotted by tribes of Indians, to a world power even the Roman Empire or the Egyptian pharaohs scarcely could have imagined.

The intangible of which I speak was the power of people of divergent backgrounds, most with nothing more than the clothes on their backs and the determination to find a better life from that of the Old World, coming together on these shores and creating America.

It sounds trite and corny and cliched, but the first Americans had more than a little hard bark on them.

Many were oppressed, whether it be in their religious beliefs, in their social station or in their complete lack of wealth or property.

They came from Scotland and Ireland and England, they came from Germany and Spain and France, they came from Russia and Poland and Bohemia, Austria, Sweden and Denmark — just about anywhere you can imagine.

Almost every immigrant to America had the same thing in common — a drive to make a better life than they had been subjected to in their home country.

It’s my opinion that’s why America’s melting pot of people was able to pretty much get along once they set foot on the shores of the New World.

 All had left the Old World behind, and all had the same thought in mind — the capability for hard work was the only thing they all possessed that a king or a queen or some nobleman somewhere in their past, couldn’t control or take from them.

So, some seven generations after the Pilgrims, when it came time to sever those last ties from the Old World and the rule of King George III and England, it wasn’t at all hard for these pioneers, these Americans of all nationalities and stripes, to cut the bonds and begin the demanding path to a new nation.

When the patriots fired their muskets at Lexington and Concord, when they mowed down British regulars at Bunker Hill and shot down the hated Hessians at Trenton, it didn’t seem to matter who these citizen soldiers were.

Before coming to America, they had been Scotsmen and Irishmen and German peasants. They had been indentured servants and freed slaves and the downtrodden of Europe.

They shed the Old World way of looking at society, and stood shoulder to shoulder with their fellow castoffs, shrugging off the prevailing view of the rest of the world at Americans’ upstart way of thumbing noses at royalty in 1775.

So, it should come as no surprise that Americans were able to win their revolution — a revolution the world had never seen, nor has duplicated from the start of civilization to this day.

From the outset of the American Revolution, our forefathers had a decided advantage.

Save for a goodly number of Tories and loyalists, Americans of all backgrounds cut the bonds that tied them to king and country. They were defending their homes and livelihoods, not king and country.

At our beginning, the English army and navy were considered the best in the world.

And yet, we vanquished them with no small effort.

A sometimes rag-tag lot of colonists somehow found the wherewithal to stare down one of the greatest powers on earth and defeat it.

Ofttimes I think we tend to forget just how great a challenge our forefathers faced.

They hacked a living for their families out of a wilderness, and changed the course of history.

I sometimes worry that we, as Americans, have begun to lose the very intangible that brought us together in the first place.

I’m troubled America is becoming what it fought a revolution against those many years ago, when the seeds of democracy and the us-against-royalty mentality shined throughout this nation.



Christy is news editor at the Enid News & Eagle and can be reached at davidc@enidnews.com