what does it mean to you to be an american?
We asked 20 people on what it means to be an American in this day and age.
Never giving up
American pioneers met tremendous obstacles every bit they crossed the plains and mountains of the West; they had no roads, they had few trails, and they had only rough equipment to bring their entire families over rough terrain.
Entrepreneurs are the modern equivalent of those pioneers. Like those intrepid adventurers, entrepreneurs are seeking a meliorate life. Americans don't quit when there are obstacles or challenges. Same with every true entrepreneur, we but don't surrender, don't quit, ever.
When I wanted to start my own company, I stayed truthful to myself; I didn't take VC money which was unheard of in Silicon Valley. I mortgaged my firm and took out a bank loan in pursuit of the American dream even though the bank required me to make the company profitable from mean solar day one.
With true American grit, hard work, and the spirit of an entrepreneur, I led Micrel for 37 long years, all but 1 were profitable.
Hard piece of work, conventionalities in yourself, never, ever giving up, that is the essence of being an American.
Living your life by example
To answer the question, I experience one must have gratitude for what America offers and appreciate being an American! My story and that of my family is deep-seated in values, respect and a love for freedom. Plus, our love for America.
Equally the Founder and Chairman of a global pilus care visitor located in Houston, TX I envisioned the red, white and bluish of an American Dream from an early age. Born in the Middle East and the son of a Sheikh and Chief of the olive farmers in Palestine, I was born in mid-October 1942.
I entered the world during a paradox: a year of struggle and claiming but also a season of love and peace. As a child, I grew upward exposed to the trials and tribulations of war.
It was during difficult times that my father would share his stories of coming to America in 1920 and how information technology was the country of peace, liberty, and liberty. He would also talk about the education offered in America to be whatsoever yous wanted to exist as well equally the opportunities to live the American dream.
I oftentimes dreamt of leaving Palestine and coming to America one mean solar day and I did. On Apr ane, 1965, with only $71.00 in my pocket, I landed in America.
In 1966, I obtained my cosmetology license and began working in a salon. After some health issues and allergy to ammonia, I used the noesis of creating colors from my mother to create the outset ammonia-free pilus color. I went on to create boosted professional hair intendance products and styling tools.
The hairdressing profession calls me "The CHI Man" while I will consider myself "American by Pick" which is the title of my book that shares my life story.
Each day is a blessing and I thank God for what I accept been able to achieve and give dorsum to the people of this state. I serve on the lath of many organizations including the NDUF (National Defense University Foundation) as the Foundation'south Special Representative and Adviser for International Affairs. I am also humbled to be a frequent speaker on leadership at Harvard University.
Beingness American today means living your life by example. Showing others how we must work together, rich or poor, whatever your race, Republican or Democrat, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist or Christian.
Related: 5 Means to Inspire the People Around You
We must all strive to leave the world a better identify than we found it. As Americans, we are individuals who come up from different cultures, religions and economic backgrounds– but our futurity is made together, made in the United states of america.
My dreams, my goals and the opportunities I was gifted with are my testaments of what it ways to exist American today. God bless America.
Having the right and liberty to choose
In that location isn't one America anymore, and there never was one America or one type of American.
In a country of about 330-meg people, there isn't ane thread that binds usa all. We celebrate different holidays, vote for dissimilar political parties, worship different Gods if any, eat different foods, and don't even concur on what to do during the National Anthem. At that place isn't a common civilization or national identity.
And unlike during the Cold War, nosotros can't even agree on a mutual enemy. Is information technology Russia? Red china? Ourselves? At that place isn't even a consensus on America'southward physical borders and whether nosotros should have them or have open borders.
And some Americans aren't even enlightened that the United states of america territories are part of the United States and those that live at that place are American citizens.
Merely this is exactly what makes Americans American. We can disagree. Nosotros can bask unlike things. We can debate amongst ourselves. Nosotros can exist vegans and meat eaters. Pro-life and Pro-Pick. Yankees fans and Dodgers fans. Republicans and Democrats.
America is the land of individualism even if that individualism is to choose to be office of the collective. The one matter that makes Americans American isn't a culture, a organized religion, a political credo, or even the Super Bowl, it is our Constitution that grants us the rights of Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Associates, information technology is our institutions that were designed to allow united states of america the freedom to choose even when we disagree and even when we decide we were wrong, and then allows the people to modify those institutions.
What does it mean to be an American? Information technology means having the right and liberty to choose what that means.
An individual flavour in a complex mixed treat
I write this article in an international airport. I write this article embracing the naive, perhaps slightly narcissistic, assumption that "American" ways the United State of American, and we forget the human relationship with Canadians, Mexicans, and other Latinos in Central America who all take lives and humanity in other American areas.
I write this article while observing international people in America, remembering my fourth dimension serving and enjoying vi dissimilar countries. I write this article while remembering working with members of the Sioux tribe in Mission, SD, mentoring higher athletes from all over the globe in my dorm during undergrad, and hosting high school and college students into the diverse inner-city of Nashville, TN.
I write this article while holding tight to my formal academic education that taught me about the roots of "American" history digging deep into religious structures.
My listen is currently like a multi-ingredient intellectual Blizzard, with all of the ingredients passionately fighting to get me to observe their individuality. The master ingredient of Sioux and other Native Americans get transformed by all of the niggling pieces of European immigrants from the past several centuries. Those new pieces, once so stiff, now dwindling in influence equally chunks from Asia, Latin America, and the Middle Due east brainstorm to change the structure of this ever-irresolute Blizzard.
Similar The Campfire, The Credibility Dough, Regal Oreo, and so many other delicious Blizzards should we also take a tricky name for the cultural Blizzard that describes what it ways to be an American?
Should centuries of negative and positive innovations, battles, relationships, and heartaches experience the summation by two to three words?
A mixed treat by the name People of Passionate Purpose highlights the people who led innovation and revolution but overlooks individuals who take, for years, been taught of their inability to succeed, embracing an blah lifestyle.
A mixed treat past the name Compassionate Christian Comrades embraces a traditional reality that doesn't exist and may accept never really existed in Americans as a populous.
The traditional one-sighted, sometimes legalistic, perspective forgets that the forefathers of this neat state paved a place of religious freedom, entirely. In this illustration of a mixed treat, this is where lactose intolerant comes into the equation.
Sometimes embracing what we thought was the foundation of our country makes others sick considering of either transformation or misinterpretation over the years.
Honor, pride, trust, passion, innovation, craftiness, loyalty, and many other traits (negative and positive) are just a few of the chunks that dive through the filter of event and fourth dimension orientation, shame and honour cultures, efficiency and hospitality focus, and many other unique principles that allow elements to go blurred into one cracking mixture.
When enjoyed appropriately, the mixture tastes so pleasant. The problem is though, we treat this mixture every bit the primary course instead of the dessert. The principal form is that of humanity.
We must embrace humans as humans earlier we enjoy the treat of individuality. Eating whatever dessert in place of the master course does not lead to pleasant bedtime.
What does it mean to be American: It means you are an individual flavor in a circuitous mixed treat.
One question is, will those observing the treat known as American culture taste your flavour? The other question is, will you focus too much on the treat and forget that the existent importance is humanity?
Breaking the limiting beliefs
Growing up with an immigrant father who came from poverty but worked his manner up to a Ph.D. and a ticket to America, I was taught to go to school, get good grades, graduate college, and become a corporate job. This was my dad'due south "American Dream" for me.
After fifteen years of being a rat in the race of corporate Sales & Recruiting, I burnt out and launched my ain professional dwelling organization company. I netted a profit in the first year of my business that immune me to cover all my basic expenses with zero debt. Dad is slowly coming effectually, although he still has no idea what I really do!
Breaking the limiting beliefs and anchors of our family unit are primal to making it in entrepreneurship, especially every bit a first-generation American.
When I stopped caring what people think, my business soared. I transformed the lives and businesses of 250 clients in 2018 and I plan to double that in 2019! This is my American Dream!
Free to believe in whatever yous choose
Living in the Soviet Union, I viewed America equally being the land of freedom and opportunity. Ultimately, to be American means to be gratuitous with your religious beliefs, to be gratuitous to your ideological behavior, and to exist able to place opportunities and deed on them regardless of your groundwork.
Even though I wasn't built-in here, I consider myself to exist American because I am complimentary to believe in whatever I choose and when a business opportunity presented itself, I took it and take a prosperous business organisation.
Jimmy McMillan
Owner, Heart Life Insurance & HiBMI.com
To be an American is to be a trailblazer
Your path is non ready. Your fate is never sealed. Your die is not bandage. You can settle an entire continent, win a few world wars, cure polio and put a man on the moon if yous put your mind to information technology. In that location is no "manifest destiny" for an American. We get to manifest that destiny ourselves.
As an American, the opportunity for something truly spectacular is all around if we cull to make it happen. I take cracking pride and condolement in these thoughts.
Trish Lake
Possessor & CEO, TLC Cleaning LLC
Today Americans are overworked, overtired, overstressed and constantly on the run
With the boilerplate American working 45+ hours per calendar week we are starting to leave out time for family and friends. My company constantly sees the stressed-out parents begging us to help take some weight off their shoulders. It has become a way of our gild to ever be on the move.
More than Selfies, more kids activities, more piece of work hustle. The stop result is becoming the "American Dream". My company is successful considering Americans are overstressed.
A responsibility to uphold the institutions that made this country
Existence an American means that we all have a responsibleness to uphold the institutions that made this state and requite dorsum to the community.
Americans of past and present sympathise that the investments and contributions nosotros brand will non necessarily be enjoyed past us but rather our children and grandchildren.
This means cleaning upwardly our parks, doing ethical business organization, looking out for our neighbors, and ensuring the poor and young have the opportunities to get ahead. If you're willing to piece of work, an American is willing to help you.
Americans expect out for the long-term interest for the country and each other. That's how we build things that concluding. Our land is built upon a rock foundation of tradition, not of forehandedness or material gain.
To exist an American means something dissimilar to everyone
To me, it means I am blessed. It means we are all blest. This country, however imperfect, is packed with more beauty, boggling people, and opportunities than we are atomic number 82 to believe.
To exist an American ways I have a responsibility to value and take advantage of these things. Too many people take given and go on to give besides much for usa to allow ourselves to exist undone by anger and divisiveness.
People like my husband, who died in Iraq, gave their own lives and then that we may live fully and freely, and to help others do the aforementioned.
Information technology breaks my centre to see politics existence used as a weapon of divisiveness. I believe we every bit people are better than what we are assuasive ourselves to become.
Related: nineteen Best Political Books of All Fourth dimension
To be an American means we should be unapologetically patriotic earlier we are political considering when nosotros approach our challenges as one united entity nosotros have more power to overcome them for the greater good. It means the service and sacrifice of so many are non forgotten.
Linda Ruescher
Laurels-Winning Wellness Educator | Speaker | Author | Musician
We are suffering from a dumbing downward of America
As an American in 2019, I am more fearful and saddened that I have been at many times since the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. Hatred and xenophobia continue to grow spawning violence.
The middle class continues to compress. We have children in poverty and some people unwilling to acknowledge their suffering much less spend taxation dollars to alleviate their hunger and need for medical care. The list goes on and on.
Fifty-fifty worse is rampant ignorance, from the top downwardly about how government works and why we demand to preserve the ramble separation of powers and rule of police. We are suffering from a dumbing down of America.
A poorly educated and sick-informed electorate is a danger to our very style of life. Cut funds for education, poor teacher pay, and for-profit charter schools have diluted our educational standards.
The source of these and so many other bug, that as a commonage society, we have lost our humanity. Yep, there are many who care. There are many who do not care, operating from a mentality that, "I have mine. Get your own."
Traditions of questioning the present
A patriot honors our long American traditions of questioning the nowadays, seeing how we tin make people'southward lives amend, and taking steps to bring it about–and putting the expert of the whole ahead of individual fiscal success.
Thus, activists involved in such causes as climate change/environment, peace, immigration reform, pluralism, democracy, or gun safety are usually patriots.
Hither'due south how I do my patriotic work, along with being out in the streets and going to meetings:
As a profitability consultant for greenish and social entrepreneurship businesses, I evidence businesses how they tin can get beyond mere "sustainability" (keeping things the same) to "regenerativity" (making things better).
I work with them to develop and market assisting products and services that turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate modify into planetary residual.
Don't take your rights for granted
Beingness an American can exist boiled down to affectionate your unique, unalienable rights.
While Americans are guaranteed certain bones rights, non every country is so benevolent and costless. In fact, many countries restrict liberty of speech and organized religion, do not let citizens to own guns, don't guarantee due process, and expropriate private property without proper compensation.
Nevertheless, many Americans take these freedoms for granted and have sought to have them limited out of a simulated belief that it will enhance the quality of life for all Americans. John Adams famously said that "Rights cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights are derived from the Bang-up Legislator of the Universe."
The U.s. was founded on the principle that there are certain rights which are just above the authorities. The keen founding fathers believed that government should be limited every bit much as possible since it inevitably leads to the suppression of the rights of the citizens.
This precept is nevertheless clearly relevant in a earth in which "free countries" will jail and fine citizens for violating "speech communication laws", pursuing better healthcare, and defending their property.
The fact of the matter is that Americans are by far the freest people in the world. Therefore, information technology follows that being an American means knowing those freedoms, affectionate them, not taking them for granted and absolutely never forsaking them.
The most unique things about Americans is patriotism
Through American history, probably one of the most unique things about Americans is patriotism – non ditching your country even when it's at your own loss.
Whether it was during the Revolutionary War, when the US almost lost to England but miraculously pulled off a win, or something else, Americans have always stood by their state.
That'southward why, in my opinion, being American is standing by your ain country. Fifty-fifty though some people might not concur with what our electric current president is doing in role, they need to realize that it'southward non permanent. We need to look at America overall, not merely the current circumstances. What makes America so unique is that anybody has a different mindset – and therefore nosotros accept a lot of innovation.
Nevertheless, no matter what happens, I experience that it is important to remain patriotic to your own state, even through hard times. Information technology volition only benefit us in the future.
Nancy Schimmel
Songwriter, Sis's Choice
Being adept citizens of our city, canton, and state
Being an American in 2019 ways affectionate the amazing natural wonders of our country, from the waterfalls of Yosemite to the butterflies in our front yards. It means cherishing our young man Americans, from the kids playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, to our favorite team playing in the finals, to Yo-Yo Ma playing cello at our southern border.
It ways appreciating all our history: non just memorializing presidents and generals but putting Harriet Tubman on a twenty-dollar bill and protecting the Native American sacred spaces threatened by logging and fuel extraction.
Being an American in 2019 means going beyond the fifty states and recognizing that Puerto Ricans are Americans too, and deserve our full-out support when they are hit past a hurricane.
It besides means looking beyond our states and territories and realizing that what happens in Africa and Asia affects the daily life of Americans and vice versa and that our unsustainable free energy production and farming methods touch everyone in the world through climate change.
It means focusing on our locality within America because many of the changes nosotros need to brand are more effective on the local than the national level: solar panels on the rooftops of our public schools, support for public transportation so that people tin can afford to get to work without producing then much pollution.
Some of what it ways to be an American is what it has always meant: helping neighbors, welcoming newcomers, voting. But being expert citizens of America means beingness good citizens of our city, county, and state also, so voting means voting all the way down the ballot. And permit us recollect that being citizens of the Us nosotros are, by treaty and in our own best interests, citizens of our world.
Jennifer Billman
Director of Public Relations, Contender VC LLC
Living in a free country
For me being an American means living in a free country where I tin can freely limited my organized religion, sexuality & share my opinion and thoughts without fearing incarceration or even death.
My mother was raised in E Frg, an oppressed land. She was expelled from school after wearing a Coca-Cola shirt her grandmother from Westward Germany mailed her. Hither in America, I tin ship my kids to school without fearing incarceration because my daughter is wearing a shirt that hasn't been canonical by the government.
Having a multicultural, multi-ethnic family unit
To me, a major office of beingness American today is having a multicultural, multi-ethnic family and including holidays and celebrations from these varied heritages in our ain family unit traditions.
I am thankful to have a diverse extended family that speaks a diverseness of languages, holds varied religious behavior, and that upholds specific cultural traditions while accepting other'due south beliefs and traditions.
For example, my sister'due south wedding will be conducted by an Episcopalian priest, but will likewise include portions in French, Japanese, and Hebrew with readings from the Bible and the Torah.
I know this blazon of liberty and credence isn't available everywhere in the world today, which is why it's something I cherish nigh being American.
Trent Hankinson
Managing director & Frontman, Aqua Seca Band
Existence an American just might be the most unique experience in the world
Pretty much nowhere else in the world can you be accepted so graciously and so speedily. For example, in Japan, it is very hard to become a citizen. In fact, information technology is so uncommon that rarely anybody goes through with it.
But in America, all you have to do is remember a few facts, believe in democracy and follow some laws, bam! You are an American! It is so wonderful.
My family came here from southern Germany most 100 years ago. My great, cracking granddaddy did not like the direction Germany was heading in 1910, and then he got the family together and boarded a send to New York.
109 years later, I sit hither in LA and call back virtually how dissimilar my life would be had I stayed in Federal republic of germany. Would I work every bit hard every bit I do now? Would I be able to enjoy democracy as I practice hither? Would I be able to take equally much convenience as I do?
Chances are that life would be much different if we had stayed in Germany. I have traveled dorsum to Frg many times in my life and found that life is prissy, simply I always enjoy returning to the United states of america.
A place where 24-hour Walmarts are the norm and businesses don't close from 1 pm to v pm for some strange reason (Spain/most of rural Europe).
Beingness an American is not all nearly convenience though, information technology is about doing what y'all want to do. Beingness able to wake upwardly every day and make up one's mind what it is you want to have an impact on. What it is you lot want to make shine. For me, that is music, and playing it to as many people as possible. Merely to you, it may exist different.
Maybe you enjoy volunteering, or working with your hands, or designing a new component for an aeroplane, whatever it might exist. Being an American ways being an entrepreneur. Information technology means setting out in life with your own plans, your own Manifest Destiny.
And but in America volition nobody try to end you.
To accept respect and honor for your country and those that live on it with yous
Being an American no longer has ane cookie-cutter definition. I am a walking example of this, a Third-Culture-Kid, having been born with an American passport but in Frg. The commencement 12 years of childhood were spent traveling around the globe, picking up new cultures and worldviews along the way.
I have been, and always will be an American, only with a petty flair. I think about Americans accept that these days, a trivial flair. A little of something that makes us different makes us costless, makes us American, in our ain way.
To be an American means to have respect and honor for your state and those that live on information technology with you.
Information technology means, having the freedom of expression, beliefs, and emotion. Information technology means living the life yous want to live, every twenty-four hour period regardless of your race, faith, or gender. It is a beautiful blend of individual flair coming together to make one colorful flag of red, white, and blue.
Source: https://upjourney.com/what-does-it-mean-to-be-american
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