Only Americans have the humility to call the United States an Imperfect Union. Only Americans have the audacity to promise ourselves a More Perfect Union. We don't even care if "More Perfect" makes grammatical sense. Being perfect is being perfect. Being "Imperfect" is being less than perfect. "More Perfect?" How about "Most Perfect?"

Let's say, we Americans have a good sense of humor. Grammatical sense be damned. No, scratch that. Actually, our founding fathers had quite a debate over grammar. Some of them argued for "inalienable rights" in the early versions of our Declaration of Independence. They conceded to the majority who voted for "unalienable rights" in its final version. Interestingly, our modern dictionaries prefer "inalienable" as a proper adjective. 

Inalienable or unalienable rights, however, have long been declared enough but not exercised enough. Accordingly, our American history shows a gnawing gap between rights declared and rights exercised. More importantly, this gnawing gap is narrowing. If that's not progress, I don't know what is.

We know how much blood we shed in the American Civil War. In this war, only the vanquished was worse than the victorious. The victorious North was hard-pressed enough to keep the vanquished South in the Union. This was a near-death experience. This was also a near-rebirth experience. From then on, the United States continues to take on, rather than take in, disunity in terms of racism, multiculturalism,  runaway elitism, etc. 

Rarely has an American president not been called an idiot during his White House years. Rarely has Washington, D.C. not been called a swamp. Still, America is the sole global superpower. Still, the greenback is the most trusted global currency. The last time I checked, there were no queues forming outside the Chinese and Russian embassies for immigrant visas.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Author: Lingyang Jiang