Pros And Cons Of Being An American Citizen

Recently you won’t be seeing an American citizen care much about anything other than them selves. Their main priority is to ensure the perfection of their own lives. That is not being a good citizen though. Making sure your needs are met before you look up and see what you can help with is corrupt and selfish. We need to care more about how we can help our country and what we need to do to be a good citizen. Having clear goals, consistent ideals, and unity is what makes a country powerful; so when any of these components are lacking, a country and its citizens will weaken, which is happening in America. Being a citizen of America has become virtually insignificant to our people, and is now crippling us.

These three components depend upon
one another to ensure the strength of a country. We must value all these elements to check our loyalty for our countries endeavors. Specifically the ideals should be based on the standards your country wants, since it is the structure to your country’s government. But ideals consist of what you and your country should value in your beliefs, ethics, and principals so the people can jointly support their country. Our ideals (especially American) have been accepted by each subsequent generation until recently. Unity is a common understanding and belief within a group of people; it is joining together for an ultimate cause. Goals are the start of our countries ambition to aim for our desired result and produce the product of our efforts. The ideals however establish a consensus on what we value or believe in as a country, it creates boundaries on our moral standard. We have to stay true to our constitution and the morals that were founded with it. To stray off and feel superior to your own ideals is no exception. That is what breaks the core and ruins our countries long lasting policies. Being a country of the people, for everything from the military to the government to the public should be equally united in the same goals. The government however is the power that should listen then voice the verdict of our decisions. They should act upon the public’s best interests, and not single out any party or group whose stance on a matter should be determined as any less significant. If a decision is detrimental to anyone’s life in the general public, then it is likely there will be more than one person affected by the same things. The government should act upon their doings with precision and a conscious understanding of their impact on everyone. Dependant on the necessity of their actions an act should not be passed if it is going to exclude even a minority in the populations opinions. With this we can determine clear goal sets and be unified. When going through with anything you should always check your tracks to see if you stomped on any bugs.

Through out the Vietnam War these ingredients were missing for the American position.
It doesn’t matter if the opponent is right or wrong, but if you are following these tactics, you will be successful. Ho Chi Minh and his communist following was ensuing power through authority and fear. Due to the fear he was possessing in many of the Vietnamese civilians, he was able to create unity for the goal sets he was trying to reach. His methods consisted of using fear over his people to squeeze out the product he desired. Once the people saw the product he achieved by communist ideals, Minh created a massive following of communist believers to ensure the continuation of reaching their goals and his regime. He established groups such as the NLF to spread his ideals and expand his following, but also to support all sections of his military. They believed that “as long as they did not lose, they won.” Americans on the other hand should have seen their defeat coming. Constantly reflecting on the Korean War as “learning our lesson,” we should have taken the French defeat in Dien Bien Phu as a warning. Americans entered the war, head first with no structure of unity, goal sets, or ideals. Events such as the Tet Offensive had not only initiated a new phase of the war but also showed us that our unity was weak. The US, if unified would have been smarter to not abandon all their cities and create opportunity for the NLF and Vietcong to strike. We would have communicated and
sorted our priorities to know our goals before separating into remote areas. Other battles like Ia Drang showed the issues with unity and goals that have become noticed because of the failure to succeed in communication during them. The Pentagon Papers along with some accumulating underground news articles revealed much of what went wrong to the public in 1971. When the Americans had already initiated Vietnamization it was to late to change our strategy for the war effort. The papers caused discourse within our own country and distrust of our government. They were one of the large breaking points to all the built up distress over the war. In the papers we lied about the Gulf of Tokin “attack” and covered up our faults to our own people. Events such as My Lai concerning Lieutenant William Calley posed even more issues on the moral justification we had in Vietnam, for such things as our “Free Fire Policy” or “Search and Destroy Campaign.” It showed that Americans went against their own ideals when in Vietnam by not treating the Vietnamese with equal liberties, as we would give ourselves. It seemed as though we held a higher standing for ourselves when in Vietnam so we did not follow our own belief of treating all humans as equals. Killing innocent civilians without trial, not accepting the cultural difference of nations, using the threat of arms as a bribe to follow our beliefs, treating foreigners with out equality, ect. It was all that went wrong in our approach to try and gain the Vietnamese trust. When we went over to Vietnam we showed, a third world country in despair, a country that does not constitute itself by the ideals we arrived there with. In fact we did the exact things we were fighting against and did what we originally founded ourselves to not become, in Vietnam. It was a hypocritical scenario where we couldn’t learn from our mistakes until we were gone and had already lost.

In present day Afghan/ Iraq with many of those mistakes from Vietnam still hanging over our heads, we are now pushing to fix.
Since Vietnam we have initiated the Special Operations Unit, and founded many other sections of the Military to ensure we don’t make those same mistakes. Although many things are still missing from our strategy, such as going against our ideals again in the case of Abu Ghraib, we have come a long way. A friend of mine, Richard Bennett, currently serving in the US Special Opps. Group, and waiting to be deported to Afghan/ Iraq is anxious to utilize his training. His job will be to train civilians on how to protect and sustain their own government, so they can stand on their own. He has gone through rigorous training to ensure his capability in every situation but as his mother said to me in her interview, “Richie is anxious to be deported and utilize his training… but he has expressed his frustrations with the politics concerning the war… like I said, it is the Age of Information, so you can see multiple sides to every story now.” Essentially her point was to express that even if there is corruption in Afghan/ Iraq there is practically nothing the public cant obtain information on. The public’s judgment on the issues should be heard and taken into consideration by the government to change what they feel is not right based on our
ideals.
Finally, when analyzing the trends and mistakes we made in Vietnam there is significant improvement of our structure in Afghanistan/ Iraq now. Even though we still have our defects as citizens, we should always remember the three components to being successful as a country and as a citizen of that country. The unity, goals, and ideals of a country found their infrastructure. So to be a good citizen you have to work to maintain that, for your country, and for the future of your country.