I am Proud to be an American This Week!

I am proud to be an American this week.

I’m so surprised to say that. The last time I remember being really proud to be an American was during Ronald Reagan’s administration. I remember how he rose above the politics in Washington and did what he thought was the right things to do. I think that’s called “leadership”.

I’m proud because we intervened in Libya. I’m proud because we intervened in a situation where an out of control despot was murdering his own people in order to preserve his personal money machine. I’m proud because, for once, we did it the right way.

Forget the budget and the politics and the “what’s in it for us” attitude. I was always taught that ethics only count when they cost you something. If you want credit for doing the right thing, do it when there’s nothing in it for you except the knowledge that you behaved as a human being amongst other human beings. That you acted out of pure civility. We don’t do much of that anymore.

There are two types of error: errors of commission and errors of omission. The former means that you did something wrong. The latter means that you did nothing. I think an error of omission is by far the more egregious.

When my daughter’s twins were born in November I took a course in infant CPR. One of the questions for the instructor was “How do you know if someone actually needs CPR? How do you decide?” Her response was that the worst thing you can do is nothing.

We did nothing in Serbia and the Sudan and Rwanda. Is genocide our business? Are we policeman for the world? You betcha.

And we finally did something about it. And that makes me proud to be an American.