LisaTThinker

An Open Letter to Europe: Thank You for Making Us Great A love letter, with receipts Dear Europe, We know things have been a little tense lately. You've been giving us some serious side-eye, and frankly, we understand. But before this relationship gets any more complicated, we felt it was time to sit down, look you in the eye, and say something that's long overdue: Thank you. No, really. Hear us out. We’d first like to thank Europe for helping us discover that this land already had people on it. That introduction did not go well for them, and we'll leave it there. To the Vikings (yes, the Vikings) Long before Columbus got the credit (and the holiday), your people were apparently poking around our coastline. Recent archaeological discoveries confirm Norse settlements in North America centuries earlier. So to whichever Scandinavian adventurer first looked at this wild, untamed continent and thought "sure, why not” we see you. You may not have stuck around, but you got here first. Respect. To Spain: You showed up early, you showed up boldly, and you brought Christianity to the continental United States before anyone else was even paying attention. The missions, the settlements, the cross planted in the soil of what would become the American South and Southwest, that's your legacy. You were building civilization here while others were still debating whether this place existed. To Britain (oh, Britain. Where do we even begin.) First, the Magna Carta. That little document from 1215 that said, essentially, even kings have limits. You handed us the philosophical blueprint for everything. When our founders sat down to draft documents that would eventually shake the world, they were standing on your shoulders. but also, thanks, Britain. And then bless your hearts, you made it just uncomfortable enough at home that your most stubborn, idealistic, adventure-hungry citizens packed up everything they owned and sailed into the complete unknown. The Puritans. The debtors. The dreamers. The ones who looked at a vast, dangerous, unmapped wilderness and chose it over staying put. You exported your most ungovernable people directly to us. We'd like to think that worked out. Here's the part that's almost poetic: the principles of liberty you helped articulate in the Magna , created an internal contradiction that abolitionists would eventually wield as their most powerful weapon. Frederick Douglass didn't argue against the Constitution, he argued that America wasn't living up to it. And Britain, to your credit, followed your own philosophy to its logical conclusion first, abolishing the slave trade in 1807 and slavery throughout the Empire in 1833, before America got there. You exported the ideals and then demonstrated what it looked like to act on them. The moral pressure was noted. Those founding documents went on to inspire democratic movements across the globe. You're welcome, world, and thank you, Britain. And finally, and we mean this with tremendous affection, thank you for the Revolutionary War. You sent your professional army, your Redcoats, the greatest military force on earth at the time, to subdue a collection of farmers, tradesmen, and passionate amateurs who had absolutely no business winning. We beat you anyway. You gave us our founding myth, our David and Goliath story, and the stubborn national conviction that scrappy beats polished every single time. We've been dining out on that story for 250 years. And without it, we never would have had Alexander Hamilton, one of the most remarkable founding figures in history, a man so fascinating that 230 years later Lin-Manuel Miranda turned his life into the most celebrated Broadway musical of a generation. You practically wrote the show yourself. We owe you. More Below…

To The Netherlands: You built a little trading settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan and called it New Amsterdam. We renamed it New York and turned it into the financial capital of the world. But the financial architecture we built it on? Largely yours. The Dutch East India Company, the VOC, gave the world its first multinational corporation and the first publicly traded stock. The very concept of capital markets traces back to Dutch innovation. Wall Street sits on Dutch colonial land and runs on Dutch ideas, for better and occasionally for worse. So thank you for that. We ran with it. To France: Mon dieu, where do we start? You sent us Lafayette. A 19-year-old French aristocrat who was so inspired by the idea of American independence that he essentially showed up uninvited and helped us win. He became a general, a beloved figure, and a symbol of what happens when idealism meets action. We named things after him. A lot of things. Then, and this is our favorite part, Napoleon decided he had bigger fish to fry and sold us roughly 828,000 square miles of territory for approximately three cents an acre. The Louisiana Purchase. One third of our current continental landmass, changing hands over what amounted to a real estate negotiation gone extremely well for one side. We gained farmland, river systems, natural resources, and room to grow into the nation we'd dreamed of being. Merci. From the bottom of our expansionist hearts. To All of Europe (the World Wars): You're going to want to sit down for this one. When the wars came and you needed help, we came. Yes, we were late. Yes, we had opinions about it first. But we came, and together we shaped the outcome of the 20th century. In the process, and we acknowledge this is awkward, the wartime economy lit our industrial engine like nothing before it. While the men were overseas, something remarkable happened at home. Women stepped into the factories, the shipyards, the production lines. Rosie the Riveter wasn't just a poster, she was millions of American women discovering professional capability that would never fully go back in the bottle. That was a turning point for gender in the workforce, and Europe, you handed it to us by circumstance. And Germany, specifically, we want to acknowledge you with complicated gratitude. The urgency of wartime competition drove American innovation into overdrive. Radar, computing, rocketry, medicine — necessity invented a great deal. What emerged from that pressure became the technological backbone of the postwar American century. We don't take that lightly. History is complicated. Not to mention that you gave us the ultra villain that every world leader is now compared to as a measure of evil. To Russia/the USSR: You gave us the Cold War, and the Cold War gave us everything. No, really. The space race alone, fueled entirely by the mutual terror of you beating us to the stars, produced innovations that touched nearly every corner of modern life. Tang, memory foam, and satellite communication are perhaps not an even trade for the existential anxiety of nuclear brinkmanship, but here we are. You also gave us a galvanizing idea to push against. Anti-communism, for better or worse, sharpened American identity and drove decades of technological and economic development. Competition, it turns out, is clarifying. And then the Wall came down. On November 9, 1989, the world watched crowds of ordinary people tear down a concrete barrier that had divided a city, a nation, and a continent. It was one of the most visceral, undeniable demonstrations in modern history that human beings, given the choice, reach for freedom. You couldn't have made the point more clearly if you'd tried. Thank you for that image. We've kept it.