Sometimes it takes an immigrant to exhibit this kind of clear-sightedness about the merits of this country because he knows what the alternative is like. Those who are born here sometimes have no idea what goes on in other parts of the world, especially when they do not bother to study history to understand the absolute barbarity of much of humanity in the past and which we have just begun to transcend in a few blessed places on earth, this being one of them. Such people only notice all the ways in which we are still far from the ideal towards which we are still striving. They have no appreciation and feel no gratitude. And so they spend their time spreading hatred and resentment among the rest of us.