America the beautiful, America the Brave

So I was surfing TV tonight and I came across former Senate majority leader George J. Mitchell speaking at the LA World Affairs Council about America's role as a superpower and its idealogy as one. This has been a topic on my mind for a while, especially since 9/11 and the issue has been growing in my thoughts ever since fall of last year when I took a seminar with Kantathi Suphamonkhon, the former foreign minister of Thailand. What is the United States' role in the world today? Obviously the US does not have the power it had during the Cold War, but also it goes without notice that the world is not the same as it was during the Cold War. How do we reevaluate the United States' status given the changing times and climate of our international community?

I grew up in an overly patriotic family, with a test pilot father, and a lineage of American military officers literally back to "Mad Anthony Wayne" during the Revolution. I have lived and breathed 'America' since I was born. Growing up with a Naval Officer as a father, I learned how to 'deploy' and 'retire' the colors when I was 6. We never missed a Fourth of July barbecue with the squadron and on Memorial Days, we would go out in our best Sunday attire to put flowers on the graves of my Grandparents, Great-Grandparents, and Uncle at Ft. Rosecrans Memorial Cemetery, always reliving the stories of my heritage, what brought us to the colonies, why we fought for Independence, why we went West and on in American history from there. Because of my upbringing, I have always have an ardent appreciation and love for America, its history and its ideals.

However, I have not always found it prevalent to proselytize those values to the world. American values helped the United States become what is was, prior to the Cold War and helped it rise to its peak. However, I feel that in an age when a superpower is no longer needed, America does not need to be at its peak and it doesn't need to maintain a dominance over the rest of the world in order to maintain the dogma that created it. America won't decline in value or idealogy because it has and will continue to decline in power. I find that Americans must learn to separate the values and ideology of "American democracy" from "democracy" in general. Americans did not invent the democratic republic, and they weren't the first to revolt against monarchy either. Have we forgotten the English Civil War? Also, the American Revolution was a result of a chain of events and coincidence, sparked by the European Enlightenment, that was bound to occur somewhere in the western world in the eighteenth century. Some Americans find these States to be the saviors of the world and claim to be the inventors of democracy, self-government and stability in the world when really the thirteen colonies that banded together to create the United States just filled the void of what was inevitable to come in political society during the eighteenth century.

I find that for America to continue to live as a leader in the world it no longer needs to be the stalwart economic or military power. Rather it should become the idealogical balance to this world of ever conflicting philosophies by allowing thought, and discussion to occur freely in the international arena and promote a vision of "Live and Let Live." That would forever immortalize the changes to our world that the founding fathers initiated in our revolution and in today's very different world from then, we can start an idealogical revolution, first within our own corrupt nation to begin a new Enlightenment in this modern globalized era.