Here’s an early wish that you and yours have a glorious Fourth of July weekend!
And if you’re looking for a good book for that occasion—or any time of the year, really—check out this recent anthology: What So Proudly We Hail … The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (edited by Amy and Leon Kass and Diana Schaub).
It’s a terrific collection that was rolled out earlier this year at a symposium sponsored by the Bradley Foundation and Hudson Institute that I attended. The 790-page book includes essays, speeches, short stories, poems, songs, you name it, with authors from Ben Franklin to Mark Twain, from O. Henry to George Patton, from Frederick Douglass to Tom Wolfe—again, you can pretty much name them—all on the theme of what it means to be an American.
The concluding section of the book, by the way, is devoted to the topic of “Making One Out of Many.”
Amen to that. There’s much too much time spent these days obsessing on the differences between Americans, and not nearly enough on what unites—or ought to unite—us.
And so, before you fire up the grill for those hot dogs and hamburgers, let me leave you with the Mission Statement of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
The Center for Equal Opportunity is the nation’s only conservative think tank devoted exclusively to issues of race and ethnicity. Our fundamental vision is straightforward: America always has been a multiethnic and multiracial nation, and is becoming even more so; this makes it imperative that our national policies not divide our people according to skin color and national origin; rather, these policies should emphasize and nurture the principles that unify us. E pluribus unum . . . out of many, one.
We work to promote a colorblind society, one within which national origin and skin color are no longer an issue, and so accordingly we oppose admission, hiring, and contracting policies that discriminate, sort, or prefer on the basis of race or ethnicity. We oppose racial gerrymandering. We oppose bilingual education, because it segregates students by national origin, encourages identity politics, and fails to teach children English—the single most important skill they can learn and the most important social glue holding our country together. And, whatever one believes to be an acceptable level of immigration, all should agree that those coming to America must become Americans, and this means that assimilation is not a dirty word, but a national necessity.
When you think about it, what is more important to our country’s long-term health than making sure Americans are not divided into racial or ethnic enclaves, but instead share fundamental common values and see each other and themselves as, first and foremost, Americans? And can there be any doubt that we need to attend to this with more care than we have in recent years? That is the mission of the Center for Equal Opportunity.
Happy birthday, American!
