America, The Beautiful

I'm getting a little worried about America. Ok - "little" is an understatement. I'm actually petrified. It's not that I'm scared of terrorists or nuclear war - worse. I'm scared of ignorance and complacency and entitlement and selfishness and fear. In short, I'm scared of ourselves and who we've become.

When my grandparents were immigrants, all they wanted was a better life for their children, free of the prejudice they'd escaped in Nazi Germany. They came to this county with nothing; but fueled by optimism and desire, they built a life of prosperity, just as generations of immigrants had done before.

With so much anti-immigrant sentiment today, so much disdain for new cultures and different languages, I fear that America has forgotten from where we came. We fear immigrants taking our jobs; we fear work going overseas. This work was not ours to take. The work was created by entrepreneurial Americans - immigrants - who brought brilliant ideas and processes here.

To succeed, we need to live in their legacy. Not by closing the door to progress and partnership, but by further exploring opportunities. We must educate our children in science, math and technology - and the value of education itself. We must keep our babies from having babies and encourage them instead to focus on their own education, their own capabilities, their own competitiveness and their own contribution to the world.

And we must be the example we want to set. Frustrated by America's problems and partisanship and unsure of how we can make a difference, so many of us throw up our hands and return to our wine... We don't want to though - we want to make a difference. We want to stop the bleeding. But I don't know how... I wrack my brain for that big idea that will reverse America's ill, but the cancer is just too widespread, too rampant, too ingrained for one idea to make it better. So we must move in small steps, helping one person, implementing one idea at a time. The time is now. And with the hope, optimism and hard work instilled in us by our immigrant ancestors, maybe we can make this world a better place.