America’s goodness far outweighs its sins

Being a college student, I never have to go very far to hear someone speak about the horrible atrocities America has or is committing in the world. I’ve seen it on the pages of The Metropolitan, and I wonder how someone could arrive at such a radically different view of America from my own.

To be sure, America has some stains on its record, some worse than others. We have supported some horrible regimes around the world if they were willing to stand with us against communism. We supported Saddam Hussein, selling him weapons in the 1980s in his war against Iran. Go back far enough and there are the stains of slavery and the subjugation of the Native Americans.

So it isn’t a complete mystery why some people speak poorly of the U.S. But I think these people are missing the bigger picture. Yes, America has made mistakes, and yes America will make future mistakes, but more so than any other nation, as John Winthrop said of that first American settlement and so many presidents have repeated, America has been “a city on a hill,” a beacon unto the rest of the world.

Since the end of the Second World War, America has been a superpower. During that war, America sacrificed its wealth and blood to secure a free Europe and a free Pacific Rim. Upon winning the war, we then spent our wealth rebuilding Europe and the Pacific Rim — not only our allies but also those whom we had defeated.

But we were not the only victor of the war. Europe became divided into a free Western Europe and an Eastern Europe ruled by totalitarian Communists. Nowhere was the contrast between the two as noticeable as it was in Berlin. While it has been 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, West Berlin is still noticeably wealthier than East Berlin but not nearly as much as it was before the wall fell.

The Berlin Wall was constructed in 1961, not to keep people out but to keep them in. Between 1961 and 1989, the people of East Berlin and East Germany were prevented from traveling to West Germany, by gunpoint, quite literally.

During these years, many people said Americans would have to learn to accept the differences between the West and the Communists, that our differences were OK, that just because they were different, that didn’t make them bad. But there were also those who recognized there could be no compromise with a people who needed to keep their people in with the threat of death.

The U.S. has supported totalitarian dictators — some in Latin America, others in the Far East — and we have paid a price when we have done so. It has often been done in the fight against a greater enemy. Whether the price has been worth it will continue to be debated.

The U.S. has never been a nation that has needed to keep people in. Unfortunately, we are a nation that keeps people out. Were we to throw open our borders to anyone who could find their way here, our population would increase dramatically. People do not flee toward oppressive governments; they flee from them.

This was lost on many people while the Berlin Wall stood, and is lost on many people today. While the record of the U.S. is not blemish-free, it is an outstanding record none the less. Perhaps those who believe the U.S. to be an oppressive state should look up some of the people who crossed the wall from East to West on Nov. 9, 1989. They should also talk to the ones who crossed from West to East — if they can find one.

This article was published first in The Metropolitan, the student-produced newspaper at Metropolitan State College of Denver.