Esteemed Reader: Jason Stern rediscovers America

by Jason Stern, March 04, 2009

You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments: rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the universe.
—John Adams

Esteemed Reader of our Magazine:
I want to rediscover America—the America that assimilated and saved those who came from everywhere, the America that absorbed my own ancestors into the grand experiment that was democracy. From every kind of social, religious, ethnic, and economic background they came, and each was given a chance to show his or her mettle on a more or less level playing field.

My own people—the Sternsteins and Goorviches and Weinsteins and Rosenheims—all arrived at Ellis Island, at the beginning of the last century, from Germany and the Ukraine. They were able to make a new life here in America, freed from pogroms and genocide; freed from persecution for their name for God, their hue of skin, kink of hair and bend of nose. They were given the tools and opportunity to start afresh.

In the process of becoming Americans, my people buried the painful past. (I have had to go to great lengths to discover where we came from.) Perhaps it is the pain of the past that motivated the American immigrants to pursue their dreams with so much industry. Perhaps it was the vastness of the field of possibilities.

But does the door close behind those who have “made it”? More and more the power of the bold individualism that helped shape America is being funneled into new entities—the corporations. Instead of each person’s capitalizing on his or her strengths to build a business and a life, we have corporations—dead automated entities guided by a mission statement, a business plan, and dividends, searing brands into the hide of the national and international marketplace. A system that gave rise to individual initiative now produces cogs in vast economic machines. A system that educed creative diversity of production and marketing has so homogenized products and messages that almost the entirety of output can be contained in a Wal-Mart store and on 156 channels of cable. Today, instead of fostering a system tolerant of individual expression and filled with opportunity, America is sowing the seeds of repression.