September 8, 2024
Imagine What It Means to be American
By Eliot Pattison
If we were to catalog the attributes of our Founders vital to the creation of our nation, love of liberty and courage would likely top that list. Close behind would be a more subtle quality empowered by liberty, that of imagination. It is imagination and its implicit sense of wonder that drives our quest for knowledge and ultimately human progress. Our Founding Fathers had no template for creating our government; they had to imagine it based on the imperfect experiences of prior republics. Imagination is the seed of discovery, the spark that ignites our hunger for the knowledge that was once a common American cause.
But where is that lofty hunger among the most vocal segments of America? Wring the essence out of the Left’s pronouncements and you’ll not find knowledge or wisdom, only snippets of hate and tribal emotion. We may laugh at the inability of the Left to maintain substantive dialogue, but it is a symptom of a deeper dysfunction in our shared society. Our culture is exhausted, adrift because it is losing its anchors of truth and knowledge. Substantive knowledge can indeed be elusive, or just unimportant, if you believe truth to be a relative concept and imagination just something that feeds teleprompters. If you don’t recognize the need to moor yourself to the bedrock of truth, then where is the need to seek common knowledge? In that worldview there is no factual knowledge, only political scripts. Two plus two don’t equal four, that is just a construct of supremacists. There won’t be many rocket scientists coming out of that mob -- but we need rocket scientists for human progress. Young minds that should be candidates for the role are being suffocated by the Left. Simply dismissing them as “dumb” ignores the deeper crisis they represent. Their imagination, and the vital self-discovery it inspires, have been cancelled.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/09/imagine_what_it_means_to_be_american.html
