And Now, To Set a Tone...

I want this post to reflect the tone I desire to take with this blog; that of a blog that seeks to recognize and analyze the underlying concepts in politics, culture, religion, economics, et al.

I watched Charlie Wilson’s War the other day, and came away fairly impressed by the storyline. It serves as a great historical backdrop to the rise of Al-Qaeda and the growing dissatisfaction with the United States on the Arab Street.

But the biggest moment in the movie for me is when Charlie and his congressional aide are visiting a refugee camp near the Afghan border. The aide is talking to an Afghani woman and her two kids via an interpreter, and asks the woman how many kids she has. “I had six,” the woman replies. The aide is only momentarily taken aback before she turns to the daughter and asks her, “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

What do you want to be when you grow up?

Is any other question more singularly American in concept and content than that? The question itself is replete with underlying uniquely American assumptions that together form the basis for the American Dream – that catch-all mantra of individualistic ethos and capitalism.

Notice first that the question itself never wavers from the subject being addressed. The fact that the "you" is so stressed as both actor and recipient of the action is no accident; such a question posits that the individual is the catalyst for any growth or change in his environment. It is not "what you want Jess to be" or "what she wants you to be." The responsibility for one's actions lies with the Self, not with one's family, or one's friends, or one's Government. Both success and failure at the individual level of society remain attributable solely with the Self. (This concept is such a radical deviation from current American domestic policy, where Government takes upon itself the responsibility for educating, employing, regulating, and providing welfare, using citizens as a means to serve the interest of society.)

Hand-in-hand with the importance of individual responsibility runs the thread of the protection of individual rights. When the aide asks the young Afghani girl the American question, she's operating under her own experience of having few to no political or social barriers to overcome to achieve her ambitions. Such a lax framework was symbolically set in place with our own Declaration of Independence, calling for protection of the "unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Our Founding Fathers realized that in order to grant individuals the ability to take absolute and total responsibility for themselves, it would be necessary to grant those same citizens the political latitude to move freely about and each person's decision matrix to be as large as possible.

One of the best ways to sum up this American ethos comes in a quote from Ayn Rand: "The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." Not only are we responsible for choosing what we want in the United States, we're given the liberty to act upon those desires, a fact the aide takes for granted in her question.