I’ll take a blind shot at the topic at hand, if you all don’t mind.

Freedom, tolerance, justice, and opportunity are the guiding values that structure modern American politics and culture.

We value the freedom to choose - more specifically, the right to choose the subjects that grace our T.V. screens and magazines, to forgo urgent global issues in favor of stories with massive popular interest, like Brangelina’s newborn daughter. Why focus on methods to promote peace in the Middle East when Shiloh, which is the name of the golden couple’s child, means peaceful, thereby assuring us of the world’s self-correcting nature?

Americans are blessed with the generous capacity to tolerate, to open their arms wide and welcome whole-heartedly all individuals – all individuals who think, behave, speak, and (usually) look the same way. Those who have yet to see the evils of their dissenting ways are never without an invitation into this loving, enthusiastic society; all they have to do is admit their harmful yet forgivable ignorance.

America boasts of a great tradition of justice. What is a country without a court system in which people lacking sense or self-control can defend their cherished constitutional right to sue fast-food restaurants for producing delicious but highly fattening foods that induce their morbid obesity, or scalding hot coffee that one might spill into his unsuspecting groin? And let us not forget the rights of corporations, who are just like people, albeit multinational, departmentalized, hierarchical, corrupt, large people eligible for huge tax cuts.

Last, but not least, is our great nation’s historical promise of opportunity, especially for the disheartened and the inadequate. The simple, incompetent, underachieving man can find comfort in the fact that a one-time alcoholic and C-average student can beat the odds and climb the ranks to the highest political, oval-shaped office in the land.

God bless America. I mean it. I’ve heard He’s on our side.

Essay provided courtesy of user AJ.

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