Becoming American
Dinesh D’Souza was born in Mumbai, India to parents from the state of Goa in Western India. He grew up in a middle-class family in Mumbai. His father was a chemical engineer; his mother is an office secretary. He was raised without great luxury, but neither did he lack for anything. He arrived in the United States in 1978, originally through a Rotary International program, attending Patagonia Union High School in Patagonia, Arizona, and then move to Dartmouth College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English in 1983.
In 1981, D’Souza published the names of officers of the Gay Student Alliance in an article for The Dartmouth Review, including the names of those who were still closeted. While at Dartmouth, D’Souza became the editor of a conservative monthly called The Prospect. The paper and its writers ignited much controversy during D’Souza’s editorship. Later on, D’ Souza published a lot of write up with regard to his new life in America.
D’Souza able to illustrate the feelings and emotion of an immigrant coming from a third world country, for him (D’Souza), as a new comer in America he feel a typical experienced that alternate between wonders and delight. D’Souza added that, America is a country where all people has freedom, hard working, the community is organized, the economic is abundant, the roads are properly paved, telephone has dial tone, highways and sign board are clear and accurate. Moreover, the author claimed that American government provides an amazingly good life for their ordinary citizen.
Rich people live well everywhere, but what distinguishes America is that it provides a remarkably high standard of living for the “common man. ” According to him (D’Souza) that “a country is not judged by how it treats its most affluent citizens but by how it treats the average citizen”. The author added, as an immigrant coming from a third world country, you cannot help noticing that America is a country where poor people live comparatively well; they had television sets and cars.
Ordinary Americans not only enjoy security and dignity, but also comforts that other societies reserve for the elite. American worker particularly in construction regularly earned 4$ for a cappuccino, where maids drive nice cars, where plumbers take their families on vacation to Europe. If this luxurious living in America as compared to the living in the Third world country, all of us can noticed that huge gap. Because according to the author, the life in the Third world country was miserable, people are struggling for their basic existence, it is not that they don’t work hard.
On the contrary, they labor incessantly and endure hardships that are almost unimaginable to people in America. In the villages of Asia and Africa, for example, a common sight is a farmer beating a pickaxe into the ground, women wobbling under heavy loads, children carrying stones. These people are performing arduous labor, but they are getting nowhere. The best that they can hope for is to survive for another day. Their clothes are tattered, their teeth are rotten, and disease and death constantly loom over the horizon.
For most poor people on the planet, life is characterized by squalor, indignity, and brevity. The author sited some problem with regard to the situation of a Third world country are their basic infrastructure is abysmal. The roads are not properly paved, the water is not safe to drink, pollution in the cities has reached hazardous levels, public transportation is overcrowded and unreliable, economic is unstable and there is a two-year waiting period to get a telephone.
The poorly paid government officials are inevitably corrupt, which means that you must pay bribes to get things done. Most important, prospects for the children’s future are dim. Dinesh D’Souza has elaborate many reasons why America is so great, he was able to discussed some issue with regard to America’s equality, pursuit of happiness, the ethics of work, religious liberty, ideals and interest and American’s virtue. According to the author, American critics alleged that the history of United States is defined by a series of crimes, slavery and genocide.
American critics even point out a demand for apologies for these historical offenses and seek financial reparations for minorities and African-American. But the truth is that American has gone further than any society in establishing equality of rights. As documented by William Mcneill in Plagues and People, it was determined that numbers of Indians did perish as a result of their contact with whites, but most of them died by contracting diseases such as smallpox, measles, malaria, tuberculosis for which they had not developed immunities.
Surely, all of this is relevant to the reparations debate. A trenchant observation that this issue was totally healed is the fight of Muhammad Ali against George Foreman for the heavyweight title, for which this battle was held in the African nation of Zaire. The issue with regard to slavery proved to be the transmission belt that brought Africans into the orbit of Western prosperity and freedom. Blacks in America have a higher standard of living and more freedom than any comparable group of blacks on the continent of Africa.
D’Souza, stated that all this allegation is not strictly true, for a few decades now we can see blacks and some minorities have enjoyed more rights and privileges than whites. The reason behind this is that America had implemented affirmative action policies that give legal preferences to minority groups in university admission, jobs and government contracts. The author illustrates the pursuit of happiness in America because it offers more opportunity and social mobility than any other country. As a matter of fact, most societies offer limited opportunities for and little chance of true social mobility.
Even in Europe, social mobility is relatively restricted. On the other hand, D’Souza discussed the ethic of work in America that gives a worldly focus in which death and the afterlife recede from everyday view. The people gazed are shifted from heavenly aspiration to earthly progress. In America, American Founders are responsible for the change, drawing from the inspiration of modern philosophers like Locke and Adam Smith. The American Founders knew that they could not transform human nature, so they devised a system that would thwart the schemes of the wicked and channel the energies of flawed persons toward the public good.
The religious and ethnic difference in America does not lead to extreme violence; there was generally no framework fro people to coexist harmoniously, although America has a lot of religious groups, such as Hindus, Muslims, Irish Catholics and Irish Protestant, Jews and Palestinians and etc. The government still managed to balance the culture and religious difference of their citizen. One reason that separation of religion and government worked is that colonial America was made up of numerous, mostly Protestant sects. The Puritans dominated in Massachusetts; the Anglicans, in Virginia; the Catholics were concentrated in Maryland; and so on.
The second reason was, the American Founders were able to avoid religious oppression and conflict ii which they found a way to channel people’s energies away from theological quarrels and into commercial activity. D’Souza concluded his write up that America is the greatest, freest, and most decent society in existence. For him, America is an oasis of goodness in a desert of cynicism and barbarism and the history will view America as a great gift to the world, a gift that Americans today must preserve and cherish. He imagines that, if ever he remained in India, what probably is his life now?
Would he find and married a woman who was identical of his religion, socio-economic and cultural background? Would he certainly become a medical doctor, an engineer or a software programmer? For him, as a writer, he considers his life as a destined one, the opportunity to migrate in America became his bridge to gain his success in life today. Bibliography Bookstove, Nov. 16, 2007. What so Great About America. Stanza Ltd. April 08, 2007. http://www. bookstove. com/Non-fiction/Whats-So-Great-About-America-by-Dinesh-Dsouza. 59078/1
