KINDER'S COMMENTARY: GENIUS OF THE U.S. IS THAT WE ARE ALL AMERICANS

A family member who subscribes to the New York Times commended to me an article in that publication's Sunday magazine about the bloody nightmare in Bosnia. I responded by saying that I definitely wanted to read it, as I always try to include that superb piece of journalism in my weekly reading.

I then began musing on what little I actually know about that troubled area of the world. In summary, here it is: The ethnic conflict raging there is ancient, as its roots go back a thousand years or so. It is a set of religious and ethnic hatreds as fierce as any in the world, for which the region's mountainous terrain has given us a useful English term to describe the carving up of nations into multiple warring tribes: "Balkanization." (This was perhaps a more useful term when schools still emphasized the teaching of geography. If schools can find time amid the teaching of multiculturalism and self-esteem to still teach the subject today, my hat is off to them.) The first of this bloody century's great cataclysms -- World War I -- was ignited there in 1914, when Archduke Ferdinand, if memory serves, of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was assassinated by some kind of anarchist. During World War II, which of course had its roots in the first great conflict, Hitler had 300,000 troops, including SS forces, and yet was still largely unable to subdue these people. Only under the iron boot of the communists, during the period 1945 through the late 1980s, was there a rather artificial construct known as Yugoslavia, which imposed a measure of order. With the fall of the Eastern European regimes and the collapse of the world communist enterprise, the region reverted to a Hobbesian "state of nature," of brutal civil war, where "every man's hand is against every other man's," and "life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."

It was, of course, to escape the brutal conflicts of the Old World that countless millions of immigrants came to our shores, seeking -- no handouts -- but freedom and limitless opportunity. For here, as my father taught me as I was growing up, was an altogether unique ideal. Here, the original American ideal proclaimed, it doesn't matter who your father was. You'll succeed or fail on your own individual merit, tenacity, intelligence and willingness to work and not on your membership in this or that perceived "victim" group.

It didn't even matter that this ideal was imperfectly adhered to. The story of American history is the story of our fitful attempts to move steadily closer to the realization of that ideal. The genius of America, Speaker Newt Gingrich rightly proclaims, is that we're the only country in the world that could have a John Shalikashvilli follow a Colin Powell as our top military officer and have everyone accept it. Why is that? Because, he says, with wonder in his voice, they're Americans. Shalikashvilli isn't primarily a Polish-American, even though his father served in Hitler's army. He's an American. Colin Powell isn't primarily an East Indian black American (an ethnic group, by the way, that in America enjoys higher per capita income than whites). He's an American.

Surely this approximation of this American ideal explains a large portion of Gen. Powell's sensational popularity. Gingrich goes on to say that America isn't a multicultural society. Bosnia is. America is one civilization, unique in the world, which happens to be multi-ethnic, but it isn't multicultural, and must not be allowed to head down that road.

For that way lies Bosnia.

~Peter Kinder is the associate publisher of the Southeast Missourian and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.