Lynn Lowder

About the Author: Lynn Lowder grew up in Sullivan, Illinois. A Marine Corps special operations officer, he led 24 long-range reconnaissance patrols in Vietnam and was awarded the Silver Star, the Bronze Star with Combat "V," and the Purple Heart. After the Marines he spent nearly three decades as a trial attorney and senior executive, working across law, business, and veteran advocacy. At 77 he opened Rosie's Home Cookin', a 1950s diner in Naperville celebrating veterans and the American spirit.

 

Only in America

I'm a small-town kid from Sullivan, Illinois. Downstate. The heart of it all. The opportunities you gave me are, honestly, indescribable and I don't use that word lightly.

I used to tell people: the problem with being born in America is being born in America. That sounds strange until you've seen the rest of the world. Until you've watched a woman wash her family's clothes in a muddy creek. Until you've sat on a dirt floor in a Philippine village with wonderful, generous people who had almost nothing and realized your wife was going to come home and hug her washing machine like a long-lost friend.

That's when you know what you have.

I spent years in Asia. I've seen other nations, so-called third-world countries. There are good people everywhere, remarkable people. But America has been something the world has never quite repeated. A place where people arrive with nothing and build everything. Where the dream doesn't just exist as a slogan. It actually happens. Over and over. I've watched it with my own eyes.

The American Dream is alive and well. I know because I've seen what it looks like when it isn't.

There's a story I think about. A Soviet pilot named Viktor Belenko defected to the West in 1976, eventually making his way to America. The first time someone took him to an ordinary grocery store in Washington, D.C., he thought it was staged, a movie set built to impress him. It took time before he understood: no, this is just Tuesday in America. This is normal.

He came from scarcity so complete that abundance looked like a lie.

We should never forget that.

Here's what I know after serving as a Marine in Vietnam and spending years overseas: freedom is precious, and democracy is fragile. It doesn't maintain itself. It only takes a generation, maybe less, to lose what took centuries to build. Every generation needs to understand that most of the world does not live the way we live. The freedoms we take for granted, to speak, to worship, to get in a car and drive from southern Illinois to anywhere at all without asking a single person's permission, are not the global standard. They are the exception.

I know this because I left Sullivan and drove north to DeKalb for college, no permission required, no papers to file. Just a kid from downstate following an opportunity. Somewhere in those halls at Northern Illinois University, I met the woman who would become my wife. In another country, that freedom might not have existed. In this one, it was just a drive north.

Only in America.

We haven't done a good enough job telling our young people about this. About what's been built here, and what it costs to keep it. We criticize freely, which is itself an American freedom, but we don't always pair that criticism with gratitude. And gratitude, I think, is something we owe.

America turns 250 this year. That is worth celebrating. It is also worth reflecting on, quietly and honestly, what we are still capable of being to each other and to the world.

I am grateful to have lived this life, in this country, in this time.

Thank you, America. There is nowhere else quite like you.