by Zack Lieberberg
I am a Soviet migr. In 1982, I came to the United States with my wife, a one-year-old kid, and a two-piece suit that was almost good enough to go on job interviews. Oh, and I had 500 dollars in my pocket. I rented a one-bedroom apartment in the middle of a small Russian community in the Bronx. It cost me $246 a month, including utilities. I was instructed to go to the Social Security office, where I was handed $134 worth of food stamps. I brought them home and asked my wife, “What have we done to deserve this?”
I went to a Pathmark nearby and spent some of it on very basic necessities. In the line to the cash register, there was a black family right in front of me: a mom, a dad, and a couple of kids. And a couple of shopping carts filled with goods, most of which I couldn’t even recognize. I thought, “That’s how we are going to eat when I find a job.” To my surprise, the couple paid for their bounty with food stamps. I felt no resentment. Quite the contrary, I was happy to be in a country where the unemployed lived so much better than programmers did in the country I came from. In a month, I came to the Social Security office for my next allowance of food stamps and was told I was no longer eligible. They offered to put me on welfare; I declined. I came home empty-handed and asked my wife, “What have we done to deserve this?”
As you can see, we have survived it all. Actually, we prospered enough to lose everything we had when the dot-com bubble popped, which made us pleasantly anesthetized to the current economic hurdles, because now we, like Marxian proletarians, had nothing to lose, except we didn’t have any chains either. And yet, we survived again, because this is a prosperous country, which makes survival so much easier, even for schmucks like me. But all through my 26 years in the United States I couldn’t shake off the impression that chronic prosperity makes the people stupid. I don’t mean individuals; I mean We the People.
Prosperity of a nation unless the nation is Dubai, of course, can only be built by hard work of its citizens, which, in the course of several generations, creates a culture of achievement, which, in its turn, ensures that the next generation will pick up where the previous one left off and will take the nation one step further.
Unfortunately, people tend to forget the uniqueness of the culture that raised them, just like they never think about the oxygen in the air they breathe as long as there is enough of it. They see nothing special about themselves or their compatriots. What they never forget, however, is that all people are born equal be it in Scarsdale, NY, or Anar Dareh, Farah Province, Afghanistan. And since even welfare recipients in Scarsdale (provided there are any) lead far better lives that anyone living in Anar Dareh, the question inevitably comes up: Whose fault is it that no one in Anar Dareh can afford a four-bedroom house with a two-car garage in a quiet cul-de-sac amidst a beautiful middle-class neighborhood, 35 short minutes by commuter train from Manhattan? It’s hard to tell. It would be even harder to explain why there is no middle class in Anar Dareh. Or trains either. Had we not known that all men are born equal, we could have thought that people in Scarsdale are, at least in some sense, better than people in Anar Dareh. But we are not about to make such a mistake.
Fortunately, there are places on this planet where similar contrasts exist side by side. For example, Israel, where a picturesque Jewish “settlement” is often located in the immediate vicinity of a stinking slum Arabs call a town. And since no one, at least in this country, can imagine that people may actually prefer living the way Arabs do, just as no one, at least in this country, would object to living the way Jews do, it is not difficult to pinpoint the culprit there: it must be the illegal Israeli occupation of Israel’s own land.
After that epiphany, is it so hard to realize that it must be our fault that people of Anar Dareh have so far failed to adopt a constitution similar to ours, guaranteeing them all the freedoms we no longer even notice, including an impenetrable wall between religion and state, and, at the same time, adopt the national attitude that would turn the greed of individuals into a powerful engine of prosperity for their entire town? Generally speaking, the suffering of the poor must be the fault of the rich. Why can’t we take from everyone what they can contribute and give everyone what they need? What a stupid, chronically well fed nation we are.
My nave predictions of the outcome of this year’s elections failed miserably. Hillary, who, I thought, would easily move her family back into the White House, didn’t even get to run. We the People, have decided otherwise. We the People have put forth Barack Hussein Obama. We the People deserve what’s coming next.
Next Tuesday is a big day. Many of you will go to the voting booths to cast your votes either for McCain or Obama. This time, most of you will feel very passionate about their preference. To those who will, like me, will vote for McCain, I want to say this: Obama is not a plague. Obama is only a symptom. The plague is We the People.
I am a Soviet migr. I wasn’t lucky enough to become an American by the accident of birth. I chose to become an American because I believed in this country. Do you have any idea how painful it is for me to witness its demise?
