Or Bill Murray in Stripes. Let's fly a goddam pirate flag and brand from there. You tried to kill us. Marginalize us.
Here. We. Stand.
"We're Americans, with a capital 'A', huh? You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts! Here's proof: his nose is cold! But there's no animal that's more faithful, that's more loyal, more loveable than the mutt. Who saw "Old Yeller?" Who cried when Old Yeller got shot at the end?"
I'm glad somebody understood the sly reference to
Stripes up there.
While Bill Murray plays it for laughs, the point itself is damn true. Americans
are the rejects from the rest of the world. We're the descendants of the younger sons who inherited neither land nor title. The serfs and the peasants who wanted land and opportunity of their own. Of those sold into slavery and brought here under bondage. Bastard children, criminals, con artists, and rapists looking to start over in a new town (or, heck, a new continent) where nobody knew their name and they have no reputation to hold them back. Religious weirdos and various types of cults seeking to escape the corruptions of the Old World and create their own utopia here. The ones who wanted more than the little they had and were willing to risk everything to make it happen.
Mix all them together, and you have Americans.
This heritage explains much about why American society is so different from European society and even other English-speaking nations and why importing a few surface-level policies from the latter to the former won't result in much change. Americans are simply
bananas in comparison to our peers in other developed nations. We're more tolerant of risk and violent and far less deferential to authority. That certainly has its downsides. But we're all innovators, entrepreneurs, the source of much of the dynamism in human civilization. I do not think it is entirely a coincidence human history has changed more in the past 250 years than it had in the previous 12,000 and that period happens to coincide with the founding of these United States 247 years ago.
We're genetically and socially selected to be like this. The compliant ones left. The ornery malcontents ended up dumped on our shores or our borders. Much of everything else flows from this.