February 25, 2010 08:30 AM
Serving my country as United States Ambassador to Luxembourg was a wonderful experience. The people there are so welcoming and grateful to Americans. We liberated them twice during WWII, and they have not forgotten. They often told me, “Ambassador, we’re a small enough country to be forever grateful.”
My foreign service, while globally enriching, challenging, and diverse, at the end of the day, served to only deepen my heartfelt love for the most unique and exceptional place on God’s green earth – America. There’s something special about this country and her people.
It’s the greatness that comes from the simple power of freedom.
It’s the goodness of the American people that comes from waking up every day in a land overrun with liberty.
It’s the fact that we are the most generous people on the face of the planet, and we prove it time and time again. Wherever tragedy strikes in the world, most recently in Haiti, Americans are the first to open up our hearts and our checkbooks. And that makes America exceptional.
It’s the spirit of entrepreneurship and our love of free enterprise that is indelibly written into our DNA. And it’s uniquely present in our strong work ethic. It’s the ownership of one’s economic destiny.
The people of Luxembourg are wonderful, interesting, accomplished, and productive. I love them dearly. But they don’t have what we have, and what so many of us take for granted – I call it The American Soul.
What Luxembourg does have is European-style socialism. The government is pervasive – in health care, social services, education, business structures, and politics. It’s engaged in nearly every aspect of everyday life… even religion.
Four years ago, I answered the call to foreign service knowing The American Soul was as strong as ever. Today, The American Soul is under serious stress and strain. If we continue down the path we’re on, we’ll have what I saw firsthand in Europe – a whole bunch of trains that may run on time, but are filled with people who don’t own the full measure of their freedom. People who have no reason to dream about or test the limits of the entrepreneurial spirit.
When Jim Talent asked me to join him as Honorary Co-Chair of the American Freedom and Enterprise Foundation, I knew I had to answer this new call and continue to stand up for American freedom and the American spirit.
I didn’t expect to like the policies of this Administration, but like Sen. Talent, I too am shocked by the blatant attack on the American spirit and free enterprise. If we’re not willing to stand up and fight for freedom, then we are doomed to lose it.
We’re being driven in the wrong direction, to a place where American
exceptionalism may no longer exist, where Americans no longer have ownership of the full measure of their freedom, where the free enterprise system is threatened, where Americans are more vulnerable to attack, and where the government has stopped serving the people so the people can get busy serving the government. At the end of that road lies a bruised and tattered American Soul. I have no interest in arriving at the end of that road.
Through the American Freedom and Enterprise Foundation, we’ll show Missourians and Americans the true power of the American spirit and offer solutions that promote free enterprise.
Throughout history, Americans have always been passionate about freedom. The air was thick with passion when British “subjects” gathered up their tea and flung it into the Boston Harbor, probably shaking their fists in the general direction of King George.
One can imagine the Brits gathered over their own precious tea as the word arrived, and they probably shook their heads and mumbled about the uneducated dunderheads in America; what do they know about running a country? They were soon to find out.
That was 1773. Flash forward to today, and guess what? The passion that can only come from the full ownership of individual liberty still lives. The American Soul is threatened, but not yet lost. It lives to fight another day, and fight we will!
[Americans] are the most generous people on the face of the planet, and we prove it time and time again. Wherever tragedy strikes in the world, most recently in Haiti, Americans are the first to open up our hearts and our checkbooks.
