Election eve return of 'The Americans'

The United States economy is taking another pounding. We keep hearing that this is the worst of times since the Great Depression.

Our national self-esteem has been pummeled by months of bad news and negative political campaigns that have made many Americans feel helpless and beaten down. Government, we've been told time and again, is the only answer to helping us back to our feet.

Well this is one citizen of the USA who thinks that it's time to speak up for Americans, our spirit and our self-determination.

Despite the whining and complaining about Americans around the world these days, we are the most generous, merciful and possibly least-appreciated people on all the earth. If "Change" is indeed coming, then those attributes need to be left alone.

As long as 40 years ago, when I first started to read newspapers, I read of famine in India and earthquakes in South America. Who rushed in to help with workers, money, food, clothes and blankets?

The Americans did.

Not big companies. Not made-up superheroes like Joe the Plumber. Just regular Joes, sending their dollars and saying their prayers.

A few years ago, Americans sent help after flooding in Guyana; and we sent emergency relief this summer when the Saptakoshi River topped retaining walls in Nepal. When distant cities are hit by tsunamis, it is the United States that hurries into help... Southeast Asia was the most recent example where 170,000 people died.

When Chicago's Loop was flooded, when 739 people died in Chicago's heat wave, when tornadoes flattened homes and businesses in Plainfield and Utica, nobody showed up from Europe or Asia to help.

When Hurricane Katrina wrecked the U.S. Gulf Coast, the U.S. declined almost all offers of outside help and struggled through it alone.

Germany, France, Japan, Britain, Italy, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama and Bosnia were lifted out of the debris of world war by Americans who poured in billions of dollars and forgave other billions in debts. Iraq will be rebuilt for years.

The Marshall Plan, the Truman Policy - all pumped billions upon billions into discouraged countries. Now, media in those countries report about the decadent war-mongering Americans. I'd like to see one of those countries now gloating over the erosion of the U.S. economy rebuild after a calamity - without U.S. help.

You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get big screen TV's. You talk about German technocracy and you get automobiles. You talk about American technocracy and you find the artificial heart, Hubble telescope and an exploration vehicle on Mars.

When Americans gets out of this bind - as we will - who could blame us if we said, "The hell with the rest of the world." Let someone else build or repair foreign dams or design foreign buildings that won't shake apart in earthquakes.

When the railways of France, Germany and India were breaking down through age, it was the Americans who rebuilt them. Since the Federal Highway Administration labeled 4,300 Illinois bridges as structurally deficient last year, nobody has offered to help replace any of them.

I can name countless times when the Americans raced to the help of other people in trouble. Can you name me even one time when someone else raced to the Americans in trouble?

There was scant foreign help even after the 9/11 attacks. We face it alone, and I am one American who is tired of getting kicked around. We will come out of this with our flag high. And when we do, we are entitled to thumb our nose at the lands and leaders gloating over American troubles.

Finally, the 127-year-old American Red Cross reported that its disaster fund is broke after a string of hurricanes and severe summer flooding in Illinois and other Midwestern states. This year's disasters have taken it all and nobody - but nobody - has helped.

Columnist's note: On June 5, 1973, Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair broadcast a commentary "The Americans" on Toronto radio. It was just after the U.S. had pulled out of Vietnam. Our nation was divided, our economy was failing, the presidency was a shambles and America was being trashed around the world.

Sinclair's commentary was a tribute to Americans' generosity and selflessness to people abroad, while standing alone in fighting their own crises.

The above column is adapted from Sinclair's original and has been updated with current facts and figures.

&hull; Chuck Goudie, whose column appears each Monday, is the chief investigative reporter at ABC 7 News in Chicago. The views in this column are his own and not those of WLS-TV. He can be reached by email at chuckgoudie@gmail.com.