A love-letter to the USA

Ashim D’Silva
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Macky,

We just rolled past America’s independence day. Although I spent under three years in the country, a lot of my current philosophy is now defined by that time.

I don’t think of America as just a place. Rather it is a future… an ideal version of our world unrestricted by its past. America represents limitless potential.

Immigrants go to America not because of all the things that it is — though most certainly, it is many things — but because, for each of the things that it is not, there is another immigrant working hard to improve that. Because it isn’t that… yet.

That seems to be the overwhelming promise of The Land of the Free. Free to those who would make it their own, make it better, make it more than any one person could dream. The biggest reason America often gets to wave its flag at the world screaming freedom over the sound of a screeching hawk (yes, hawk not eagle), is because America promises unlimited potential for redefinition where many countries cower into their histories for definitions of who they are.

America isn’t a part of the world, but an amalgam of the best of the world. And in that way, America is a physical parallel to the internet. It is doing its greatest work because of the freedom it provides people. Because it invites people in and helps them do great things. All six of America’s 2016 Nobel Prize winners are immigrants.

America is a project the rest of the world is undertaking — it is the new world.

Like the internet, however, although it seemed to promise limitless freedom for all, a few ambitious souls may over-utilise the resource, outgrow the neighbourhood, and attempt to use their power to restrict the very freedoms that catalysed their successes.

This is why politics in America (and the internet) matters. This is why it is disappointing to see walls put up, people excluded, ideas dampened, freedoms quashed. If America represents potential, failure of their systems is a disheartening view of our future. A limit in America, is a lesson in limiting the future. America is young, and as countries with more history and more baggage, we look to America to be free of those restrictions. To view the world optimistically, and to present us not with the cynicism of age, but with a new hope.

Happy birthday America, don’t grow old just yet.

Ashim D’Silva

Written by

Half sentence philosopher, and lover/hater of cake

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