Today I make my 1776th post on KB. Which brings instantly to the mind of an American the year we fought for and won our independence from King George.
Personally, I have enjoyed many blessings from having been born in America, all the more so because my youth and young adulthood happened to coincide with the rise of our great land to the (now precarious) status of world number one superpower. To become rich, that was a dream I never had, never really wanted, and did not get to experience. That I always had, and still now have, more than enough of everything I need and want, and debt-free to boot, that has been my version of the American dream coming true.
In recent decades things have gone sour in many ways. Not that I have been sorely affected in my personal life, but I am not so proud of what we've done in other parts of the world. Yes, crushing Hitler and Yamamoto in Europe and the Pacific, that was a fine thing. I don't know if we could have succeeded as well had we not gone through the cleansing of the Great Depression of the 1930's, which was the trigger for FDR's New Deal, which put our country back on the right track. Rebuilding Europe with the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Japan into a manufacturing superpower, those were things to make an American proud. But after that, bombing the shit out of Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, et al, to make the world safe for capitalist enterprise, the oil companies, the weapons industry, the Wall Street banksters, that's the sour part.
Taking all the parts together, I am reminded of William Blake's lines in Auguries of Innocence, written in the early years of the Industrial Revolution:
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
I still like to dream about a perfect world, but I'm willing to settle for the one we've got.