Every year, on July 20, our family celebrates the day my mother and I arrived in America. We tell the stories of our arrival, of our assimilation and marvel at the unbelievable luck that we get to be Americans. I feel blessed every single day. I look at my American children and know how fortunate I am.
There are days when it’s hard to be optimistic about America. We’ve had another tough year. I hear from people all the time who are struggling in their everyday lives and find it hard to maintain hopefulness in their country’s future.
It’s not that America hasn’t had hard times before. Our family arrived in this country in the late 1970s. There was inflation, everybody admitted it. Crime was high, no one denied it. There was immigration, it was through a process. American hostages were being held in Iran; they were frequently on the news.
The difference now is there’s an avalanche of pretense that we’re all supposed to accept. We’re lied to about our problems. It makes national cohesiveness incredibly difficult when we can’t identify, or admit to the existence of, the issues that need fixing.
People are struggling to feed their families. Nearly 80% of Americans now consider fast food a "luxury." Yet economists like Paul Krugman at the New York Times pretend inflation is not happening. He posts charts that show, if you squint a little, and exclude necessities like food, energy, housing and cars, we’re doing super great.
He is not laughed out of his position. His political side quietly hopes people will believe his lies, and they stay quiet as he delivers them. They know people are hurting, but to say so would mean acknowledging a truth that might affect them politically. They should do it anyway.
On crime, we’re not supposed to notice how bad our cities have gotten. George Soros proudly funds prosecutors who refuse to prosecute crime. As he wrote in 2022, "I have been involved in efforts to reform the criminal-justice system for the more than 30 years I have been a philanthropist."
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He has succeeded in reforming the criminal-justice system, and we are all less safe because of it. His bad ideas play out on our streets. We used to understand that committing a crime comes with repercussions. It no longer does. The change has been catastrophic.
The border remains wide open and any solution to stop the flow of people entering illegally is labeled cruel. When we left the Soviet Union, we were granted passage through Italy. We were refugees and still we didn’t get to hop a flight to the country of our choice.
We arrived in Rome and a refugee resettlement organization gave us a small stipend for rent and food. We rented an apartment in Ladispoli, a small beach town outside of Rome, while we applied for entry to various countries. We did not get money from the governments of either Italy or our eventual home of America. Someone had to sponsor our family and pledge we would not be a burden on society and collect public funds. How quaint the system seems now.
And five American hostages are being held right now in Gaza. The president rarely mentions them. They were kidnapped on October 7 in Israel. In the 290 days since, Americans around the world have understood that should anything happen to them, their government will not speak up in their defense. The blue passport once meant security. It meant that bad people would think twice about harming you. It does not mean that anymore.
America is still the greatest country that’s ever been, but it’s hard not to notice our current slump. When we arrived in this country, the word used was "malaise." But the word for our current status is "denial." We’re a country in denial.
Our problems are not impossible to solve, and decline is not inevitable, but it involves facing the reality of our difficulties. We have been through turbulent times before, and we have come out the other end. We’re a country worth saving, a country worth preserving. We’re all so lucky to be American. It’s time to act like it and defend what we have.
