Not to quibble a point, but I believe this idea is a new one designed to turn us against each other.
Our ancestors were loyal to each other by virtue of the fact of kinship, familiarity, and soil. They decided freedom was the best way to secure their own interests. One came before the other. Freedom is not the heart of America. Brotherly love, blood, and soil are.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're not a neo-Nazi and are using "blood and soil" in a non-Hitlerian fashion.
Loyalty to a friend need not come from blood nor from soil. The founding fathers were English, yes, but they understood ideals far above that of "blood and soil" and built the Constitution around those loftier ideals. Their hopes in humanity's abilities may have been unfounded—man is doomed to sin and reject reason as a result—but they certainly knew from the very type of government they were fleeing that blood (the royalty and the subject's loyalty to it) and soil (the land within the borders and the subject's familiarity with it) lead only to tyranny when the blood is not Christ's and the soil is not His kingdom's.
I am no neo-nazi, but I don't completely ignore them.
I see my neighbor, who may or many not believe in absolute rights of the people, as I do, as my fellow American. I am not bound to him by ideas, but by virtue of the fact that we live near each other -- "soil". Whether he looks like me or not is irrelevant. If we are part of a community that works together for the better of ourselves, then we should stand up and defend each other from foreign aggressors.
The view that you are expressing, that somehow the Founding Fathers were building a recipe for all of humanity, was only shared by a handful of them. The vast majority were concerned with securing liberty on their piece of ground for their friends and family and community. It wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that we really started thinking of imposing our ideas on others. Until then, we simply wanted to be left alone.
America is unique because every group of people are unique in some way. We were forged out of the English Civil War, brought for one reason or another to a foreign land, fought and bled and died to make this land ours, so that we could not just feed our families but prosper.
The same way South Africans feel about the land they wrested from the hands of nature and turned into a beautiful garden -- that's how they felt about America, and that's why they were willing to fight and kill and die for it.
Take a look at the French Revolution, and you see people fighting not for each other, not for a piece of land or anything like that, but for vague ideas and vain promises. They were fighting against each other because they were fighting human nature, trying to impose upon it a new vision for the future.
We never did anything of the sort to ourselves.
Even in the Civil War, people who were very opposed to slavery left the North to fight for the South -- because they were loyal to their people, their land, and their families, not their ideas, but the people themselves.
I don't think leftists grasp the fact that this country has no ties to a physical entity nor a person but to the ideals laid out in the Constitution.
Not to quibble a point, but I believe this idea is a new one designed to turn us against each other.
Our ancestors were loyal to each other by virtue of the fact of kinship, familiarity, and soil. They decided freedom was the best way to secure their own interests. One came before the other. Freedom is not the heart of America. Brotherly love, blood, and soil are.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you're not a neo-Nazi and are using "blood and soil" in a non-Hitlerian fashion.
Loyalty to a friend need not come from blood nor from soil. The founding fathers were English, yes, but they understood ideals far above that of "blood and soil" and built the Constitution around those loftier ideals. Their hopes in humanity's abilities may have been unfounded—man is doomed to sin and reject reason as a result—but they certainly knew from the very type of government they were fleeing that blood (the royalty and the subject's loyalty to it) and soil (the land within the borders and the subject's familiarity with it) lead only to tyranny when the blood is not Christ's and the soil is not His kingdom's.
I am no neo-nazi, but I don't completely ignore them.
I see my neighbor, who may or many not believe in absolute rights of the people, as I do, as my fellow American. I am not bound to him by ideas, but by virtue of the fact that we live near each other -- "soil". Whether he looks like me or not is irrelevant. If we are part of a community that works together for the better of ourselves, then we should stand up and defend each other from foreign aggressors.
The view that you are expressing, that somehow the Founding Fathers were building a recipe for all of humanity, was only shared by a handful of them. The vast majority were concerned with securing liberty on their piece of ground for their friends and family and community. It wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that we really started thinking of imposing our ideas on others. Until then, we simply wanted to be left alone.
America is unique because every group of people are unique in some way. We were forged out of the English Civil War, brought for one reason or another to a foreign land, fought and bled and died to make this land ours, so that we could not just feed our families but prosper.
The same way South Africans feel about the land they wrested from the hands of nature and turned into a beautiful garden -- that's how they felt about America, and that's why they were willing to fight and kill and die for it.
Take a look at the French Revolution, and you see people fighting not for each other, not for a piece of land or anything like that, but for vague ideas and vain promises. They were fighting against each other because they were fighting human nature, trying to impose upon it a new vision for the future.
We never did anything of the sort to ourselves.
Even in the Civil War, people who were very opposed to slavery left the North to fight for the South -- because they were loyal to their people, their land, and their families, not their ideas, but the people themselves.
So, what makes an American an American?