What Is an American? HINT: It is NOT an ‘Asylum Seeker’

Opinion

“Cameo of a man who has just lost his most valuable possession. He doesn’t know about the loss yet. In fact, he doesn’t even know about the possession. Because, like most people, David Gurney has never really thought about the matter of his identity. But he’s going to be thinking a great deal about it from now on, because that is what he’s lost. And his search for it is going to take him into the darkest corners of the Twilight Zone.” ~ Opening narration from the Rod Serling’s imaginative series, “The Twilight Zone,” Episode 92, titled, “Person or Persons Unknown,” first aired on March 27, 1962.

There are many things a person takes for granted but shouldn’t. Among those, and undoubtedly the most important, is one’s sense of personal identity.

Many things go into one’s sense of personal identity: one’s name, upbringing, a personal belief system and the manner in which he observes the world, his sense of self-worth, livelihood, and interests—to name a few. These things are so intrinsic to his sense of self that he gives little conscious thought to them. There is little reason to. There is a sameness to such things that is reassuring. There is a sense of continuity. Such is how a person’s reality is built.

But suppose a person wakes up one day, like David Gurney, our protagonist in the TZ episode, and finds the ground has shifted out from under him.

Everyone he meets—his wife, his co-workers, his friends, claims not to know him.

He becomes understandably angry and confused and lashes out. But that only confirms to others that the man has gone insane. With his reality shattered, he spirals into a state of despair. He begins to think that perhaps everyone is right after all. Such occurred to our protagonist in the Twilight Zone episode, “Person or Persons Unknown.”

But it is one thing to watch a television program, knowing it to be nothing more than contrivance, compelling though it may be. It is quite another thing to suffer the fracturing of one’s soul in the real world.

With all the talk today of Government “Gaslighting” of the populace, one must wonder whether there isn’t something afoot to drive the nation’s people to a full psychotic break. An important part of one’s sense of self is tied to his community. That community, writ large, is a person’s Nation.

When I and my wife venture overseas on vacation, we enjoy conversing with the people of the countries we visit. They will remark, “Oh, you’re Americans.” Of course we are.

And the conversation invariably turns to where in America we live, how we live, and what we make of the turmoil that has infested the Country since the Biden Administration took over the reins of Government in January 2021.

But, while our conversations involved how I and my wife, as “Americans,” feel about America, no one, had ever asked us what it means to us “to be Americans.”

In other words, no one asks us, in these foreign lands we visit, to define the word, ‘American.’

I never seriously considered the matter until I happened to read an article in a newsletter I received from the United Federation of Teachers (“UFT”). The UFT is the New York Chapter of the National American Federation of Teachers (“AFT”).

Both are powerful Radical Left-wing teachers’ unions that have, through the years, transformed into shamelessly partisan channels of political activism, whose primary goal is the indoctrination of our Nation’s youth in the cult and ideology of Marxist Collectivism.

In the May 2017 issue of the publication, I came across an article by the UFT Vice President, Richard Mantell, titled “What is an American?” The article left me absolutely furious, and my anger compelled me to respond.

The UFT published my comment on June 1, 2017. I took Vice President Mantell to task.

Mantell’s fanciful definition of ‘American’ is grounded essentially on the idea of togetherness and goodwill toward all people, everywhere. The last paragraph of his article sums up this notion well.

Mantell says,

“I believe we have a responsibility as public school educators and as citizens of the United States to treat others as we want to be treated, to look past differences, and to recognize the reason why so many people came to this country and still do: to make a better life for themselves and their families.

That is the true definition of American.”

Really? That’s it? That’s the “true definition of American”?

This saccharine, simplistic view of ‘American’ is untrue and inane. And, at some level, Mantell must have agreed with me, because, on the day the UFT posted my comment, I noticed that the title of his “VPerspective” had changed. It was now titled, “Law Determines An American.” That was the salient point I had made in my comment.

I wondered what others in our Nation would think apart from those members of the UFT who generally would agree with Mantell.

I submitted a portion of my response to AmmoLand Shooting Sports News for publication on June 27, 2017.

AmmoLand News readers can find the earlier article at this link: Response to United Federation of Teachers Open Borders Take on Who Is American (ammoland.com).

It is not necessary for me to reiterate what AmmoLand published here.

But, five plus years after the publication of Richard Mantell’s “VPerspective” on what it means to be an ‘American,’ the absurdity inherent in his definition becomes even more glaring and menacing, and that encouraged me to further develop the ideas I had earlier written about.

We now have millions of illegal aliens residing in our Country, whom the Biden Administration has deliberately enticed in. And they obliged. And we are inundated with them, and no one knows where they are in the country. They have scattered everywhere.

Many of them are lunatics, dangerous psychotics, or common criminals whom their home nations are all too happy to rid themselves of. All of them constitute a heavy burden on our limited resources and are unassimilable. None of them have been properly vetted, and more than a few are murderous terrorists or psychopathic members of international criminal cartels.

Are these people here to make a better life for themselves? Or is it to partake in all those goodies: free housing, free medical care, food allowances, and allocations of federal reserve notes too, and to create violence and induce terror in the native populace?

UFT Vice President Mantell’s mentioning of the word ‘citizen’ in his exposition is not done to impute definitional import to the word ‘citizen’ apropos of ‘American.’

His point is that being a citizen of the United States requires that citizen to manifest what Mantell considers to be the correct attitude toward people. That attitude is grounded on a presumption about people that might be true of some, but not all, and certainly not most—especially those who come here illegally.

The Biden Administration, along with the many Political Progressives and outright Neo-Marxist Cultists in Congress, in State and local governments, in the Press and in social media, in the public schools and in academia, and the rank-and-file Leftists in our Country, all demonstrate the danger in misunderstanding or misrepresenting the meaning of “Being an American.” And, it is clear from their actions, they don’t give a damn whether these aliens are decent sorts or not.

They just want them here: one, to bolster the number of Representatives in Congress for the Liberal States; two, eventually, to bolster the voting rolls; and, three, to tear down traditional institutional structures, destabilize society, and terrorize the populace.

In a few months, through the election that will determine who will lead our Country, the Electorate will know whether the U.S. will regain its preeminence in the world as a truly free Constitutional Republic—the only one of its kind in the world—or whether we will continue down the road to Tyranny and subjugation.

This election truly is our Final Battle.

We will return to a state of grace as envisioned by our wise Founders, or we will cast it aside, seduced by propaganda, cloaked in sickening sweet priggish sanctimony, lauded by Leftist politicians and a seditious Press and social media.

In the next few articles, my business partner and co-author and I will discuss in depth what the word ‘American’ really means, from a legal and philosophical standpoint, devoid of ‘goody-goody phraseology of the sort espoused by people like Richard Mantell.

To highlight what we will be discussing in the Arbalest Quarrel, we offer this overview:

The word ‘American’ includes three salient components. Those components may also be construed as conditions that must be met.

The first is that a person is a citizen of the United States. The term ‘citizen’ is a legal term of art. It has a well-defined meaning. No one who is not a citizen is an ‘American’ regardless of his or her feelings about the Country.

‘Citizenship’ is therefore a necessary condition for one’s status as an ‘American’ but it is not a sufficient condition.

The second component of the definition of ‘American’ or a condition that must be met for calling one an “American” requires that a person be willing to take up arms to protect the Nation from all enemies both foreign and domestic.

An American will not long suffer a foreign adversary forcing its will on the people, nor will an American long suffer Tyranny of Government at home. This bearing of arms, too, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient for a person to be considered an American.

The Third Component requires a person to adhere to the doctrine of Individualism that grounds the U.S. Constitution and the crucial “Bill of Rights.”

While a person can espouse the ideology of Collectivism, as that is a person’s right under the First Amendment’s Freedom of Speech, such ideology is inconsistent with the tenets of Individualism and the concept of Natural Law Rights, codified in our Nation’s Bill of Rights.

A person who does not honor our Nation’s Constitution nor cherishes our Bill of Rights and who knowingly, willingly violates Divine Law is not an American.

These three components, conditions, or attributes go together to define what it means to be an ‘American.’ In the next few articles, we will make our case.

About The Arbalest Quarrel:

Arbalest Group created `The Arbalest Quarrel’ website for a special purpose. That purpose is to educate the American public about recent Federal and State firearms control legislation. No other website, to our knowledge, provides as deep an analysis or as thorough an analysis. Arbalest Group offers this information free.

For more information, visit: www.arbalestquarrel.com.