“Living in America is like riding a bicycle: if you stop pedaling, you’ll fall,” This is the doctrine my father has lived by ever since we moved to the United States.
1996, in a third-world country, in the corner of a beaten-down apartment sits a TV on a small, chipped stand; the flickering lights of midnight Manhattan illuminate the screen. Skyscrapers stand like crowned jewels that any man would dream to reach. Charming businessmen, big white smiles, bustling streets: this is where you want to be. At this moment, my father found himself paralyzed from astonishment at the scene before him on the small television screen. America truly was the land of opportunity, and so it stood as a beacon of hope in the dimmed light of my father’s eyes. After all, only those who have felt the cold, rigid bars of their cage know the incomprehensible sensation of having their innate longing for liberty awoken.
My mother would often describe the immense hardships she faced while growing up. At a mere 18 years old she knew there were very limited options in life. As my parents put it, you are stuck. There is no hope in places such as these, and as a direct repercussion, generation after generation, passion dies down and ambition is lost because ambition itself, is a lost cause. Was this how our forefathers felt?
It was on July 4th, 1776, that our Founding Fathers drafted a document that would attract more immigrants seeking opportunity to America than any other country in the world. Did the forefathers imagine a man like my father or a woman like my mother when they wrote the words “inalienable rights”? There may have been numerous issues that our forefathers disagreed on, but they all promised individual rights. They vowed that we would all not just experience liberty–but would have the liberty to pursue our happiness–an idea that is so powerful and essential to everything that America symbolizes today–and an idea that was so foreign to my parents.
In 2015, when my family was sworn in as citizens of the United States of America–fulfilling our American Dream–the judge told me something that has since been burned into my mind: “Your rights are like a muscle: if you do not exercise them, they will atrophy.” I have been blessed enough to have such opportunities lie within the palm of my hand, and it would be a sin not to grasp it with all my might. I know there are people who would readily leap into a lion’s den to merely brush their fingertips across such a precious gift.
I will never forget what I am capable of because I reside in this country, I commend the unwavering dedication of our Founding Fathers for this, and–most importantly–I will never stop pedaling.