What Is American?

In reading and interoperating the letter by de Crevecoeur you get a great understanding for what life was like living in the United States, and the rest of the world. For one, writing has changed a lot over the last couple hundred years. I guess I have to get used to it. By reading this letter by de Crevecoeur, it feels like I’m in eighth grade English again, reading Macbeth, or all of the great works by William Shakespeare. In no way am I complaining, I love the old way of writing English, it just takes getting used to reading again. 1782 was a very different time for the United States and the rest of the world. The Revolutionary War was going on, there were only thirteen colonies in the United States, and Great Britain owned pretty much owned the rest of the world. Most important, they claimed to own the United States and we were fighting them for it.

Can you imagine a war being fought on our land? We haven’t fought on our own land in a long time and other than Pearl Harbor and September 11^th, no real war activity has taken place here. To imagine what those people were going through at this time in history, is unbelievable. You have to understand, people either lived on farms, living off their land, lived near the water, living off of it, or some in cities. People came here, like they still come today, for freedom. I guess when you are born here, you can take advantage of what we have here in the United States, a lot of people don’t have it as good as we do. Life in Europe was very hard. People were in social classes, ruled by strict governments, and unhappy. America was a hope at a new life, and also a new beginning. So people left their so called lives all over the world, got onto ships for weeks to months at a time, and shot across the ocean as fast as they could to the “New World”. Here people could own their own land, have their freedom of their own religion, vote on who they wanted to be in place as President and other government officials and also the freedom to be who they want to be with the jobs they want to work. Most people in other countries didn’t have freedom of religion, they had to worship what their government wanted them to. When they came here, they could build churches and communities, to help support their religion.

Live seemed so simple back then, you could live off the land. I guess you could still do that today, but to my understanding, farming is almost going extinct. The government pays some farmers not to farm their land today.  People seemed to have a simple, content life, children worked the farms with their families. Life today is not simple and I’m not to say people aren’t happy today, but we just went through a recession, and there are still people out of work here and around the world.  Although farm work is very tough work, I wouldn’t want to do it everyday, jobs today are more challenging on the mind. 

What is American? It seems like today, that almost nothing is made in America. For instance, most of our American flags that we raise and hang with pride, were made in another country like China or Taiwan, probably by people who still think that the United States is a whole lot better place to live than the place they are currently living.  Other than some of the car manufactures in the United States, like Ford and General Motors, it seems like all of our other industry leaders outsource jobs to other countries. It’s a real shame, because United States companies like Apple, Microsoft and Google, all outsource a lot of jobs to other countries, for their cheap labor. “American made” used to mean something, when we were known as an industry country, like during the Industrial Revolution, now its rare to find goods that are “American Made”, but usually still great quality.

Overall the United States of America has changed since the time that is was discovered, some would say for the better, some would say for the worst. What country doesn’t change over time, the key is changing for the better over time. I think overall the United States has been moving in the right direction since de Crevecoeur wrote this letter back in 1782.