In defense of shaddy heritage

Soon I will be seventy years old, they call that a milestone, so be it. I have been in this Country since nineteen seventy. Since then I have been like a kid in a wonderland, learning things, witnessing events, great, noble, and abominable. For the positive and the negative, I have been a witness in awe.

I have seen and still see in my new compatriots men and women an eagerness to learn about their past and their ancestry. I have seen in them an effort, almost an obsession to, somehow, connect their DNA to some famous or historical figure, prizing some connection to the Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and the Founding Fathers, before, or after. I found this desire, this obsession admirable and even charming.

I have learned to recognize the enormous chasm between the Americans, the people and the Americans, the perception of it by people from outside Countries reacting to the foreign policy of the Country.

The political exercise of all the succeeding Government have had a regrettable result, in foreign lands, to have the most generous Country in the world despised all over the world by people who, paradoxically have a very soft spot for the American people at the same time.

The answer to this paradox originate by the separation between the political life of the US being guided by people who cherish their heritage being descendants of the idealistic (theoretically) groups of those Pilgrims, Founding Fathers and passengers of the early migration and the actual actions of people knowing that their heritage is maybe a little less lofty but in my book much more remarkable.

The descendants of the struggling people, the people who went for broke crossing the Prairie toward the West, the miners, the gamblers and even the descendants of the Lady of little virtue of the Saloons of the West have in their soul the virtues of the desperate. They know of their human imperfection and extract great things out of it. They know that if your neighbor suffers you must help. They know that one who sin must be given understanding and support for a second even a third chance. They know it because they are descendants of people who could not have survived without the support and understanding of their fellow in misery. And all those people are those who make this People admirable, not the descendants of the Mayflower.