September 07, 2026
America - the Torch that Lit the World
Timothy Birdnow
Here is the feel-good story of the day. A very inspirational post about how America fundamentally changed the world, written by a person who was brought here as a child.
FTA:
For thousands of years, the world was an old place. Human beings walked, rode animals, sailed with the wind, cooked with fire, and lit the darkness with candles. Civilizations rose and fell, but the basic human experience remained stubbornly familiar.
Then, in 1776, the world roared.
America was where the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment became a living experiment. And with America came a question that changed the human condition: What if?
What if the old limits were not limits at all? What if a human being were free to wonder, experiment, invent, fail, and try again? What if a person could look at the world as it was and imagine it as it could be?
America didn’t invent curiosity. It created a place where curiosity could run. A thought became an experiment, an experiment became an invention, an invention became an industry that transformed the lives of millions. Someone looked at darkness and asked, What if we could make our own light? Someone looked at distance and asked, What if a message could travel faster than a horse? Someone looked at the sky and asked, What if human beings could fly? And someone looked at the Moon and asked the question waiting for humanity since the beginning: What if we could go there?
Granted, there had been great scientific and technical innovation that had been ongoing for generations BEFORE America (the Middle Ages, for instance, saw huge leaps forward in science and technology) but it was the founding of America that saw a sea change; suddenly all sorts of things were being invented and created. Yes, it was also happening in Britain too, and even France and Germany, but one could argue the American Revolution is what sparked a lot of this.
I wouldn't argue that it was the key to all of it, but it certainly was an important building block.
The wild, untamed North American continent presented the early settlers with serious challenges. The crops they were familiar with didn't grow in the soil, or grew sometimes and not other times, and new crops had to be planted, or new techniques developed for growing the old European stuff. (That is the debt the Pilgrims owed to the Indians, who taught them to eat squash and other native plants that allowed them to survive the famine of those first couple of years). By necessity the colonists had to develop new ways. And they had to build their own tools oftentimes from what they could scrounge. Swedish settlers brought the idea of the log cabin, for instance, and it caught on in America where there were plenty of trees and little time to build a structure. Early colonial buildings were sawed lumber frame houses, as in England at the time. Log cabins saved huge amounts of time in construction and a more secure building as the logs were hard to break through.
There were so many things the American settlers either devised or adopted. Eli Witney's cotton gin made cotton a viable clothing source; before it cotton was a luxury item because it took hours to pick the seeds out of the fiber. (Sadly that same gin made slavery a viable industry in the U.S. because the growth of cotton expanded and it still had to be picked by hand.) Of course we went on to invent things like the telephone and viable electric light and a host of other great things. All of this came because we learned to experiment, and there was money to be made by turning ideas into realities.
As this author points out, the very competitive nature of this spurred Europeans to follow suit. France had a revolution that was inspired by ours. And all of these nations liberalized (I hate to use that word) laws, allowing free markets as Adam Smith had suggested rather than maintaining the old highly regulated Merchantilist system that Europe had long promoted.
So the "shot heard round the world" truly was that. And this fellow - an immigrant - figured that out. Sadly many native born Americans have not.
He continues:
That is America: not finished, not satisfied, still reaching for something further out. And God, I hope we never stop.
I know something now I could never have known then. That boy did not simply arrive in America. America arrived in him: the freedom, the possibility, the audacity to believe tomorrow could be better than today.
So yes, I believe that America is exceptional. Not because someone told me to, but because I can look at the evidence: where humanity began, what Americans built, the Moon, and the boy who came from Havana to stand beneath those rockets. We did this. We earned it. And I am damn proud to have become an American.
Yes, it is America that creates, and it is the America in us that leads us ever onward. De Toqueville said that about the American character, that we were always dissatisfied and looking for something better. It is not a vice; it is what has driven us to invent, create, develop, and make the world a better place. Dissatisfaction with the old world is in our DNA. De Toqueville saw it as a virtue too.
And with the closing of the frontier Americans went into creation overdrive; they no longer had the frontier to tame. It's why the 20th century so so many innovations. It's why we fought foreign wars. It's why we went to the Moon. There was the Turner Thesis, which argued there would be immense psychological changes to the American People with the closing of the frontier. Turner was correct and many went off the deep end, adopting crazy socialist ideas. But others went on to create computer technology never before seen, or to build incredible vehicles, like airplanes. Telephone technology went into overdrive with satellite communications, making the whole world interconnected. Yes, America created the world in which we now live.
All of that because our ancestors dreamed about a better life, left their homes and settled in a wilderness, then refused to let the King come over and boss them around.
It is a truly amazing story and if we hadn't heard it over and over we would be amazed by it. Surely if it were a work of fiction by some author, say, James Michener, we would scoff at the improbability. But it really happened.
So bravo for this guy writing this. He shows what gratitude is, and how an immigrant more than any other can understand that Lady Liberty's torch means more than just more voters for Democrats.
Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at
10:15 AM
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