A Quilt Of A Country By Anna Quindlen

When a society has witnessed a horrible happening, the society will grasp at any strand of happiness or hope it can. These strands of hope can be a concept of happiness or a chance to immigrate to a foreign country because of the ideals on which the nation was founded. In 1776, the Founding Fathers gathered to discuss the tyranny the colonies had undergone during their imprisonment by the British government. They developed an improbable idea that turned into a reality. In “A Quilt of a Country” by Anna Quindlen, the author successfully argues that America is an improbable concept by showing contradictions in the American Declaration of Independence as seen in the education program, the blends of cultures, and applications of

the Declaration of Independence to society.
In “A Quilt of a Country,” the author proposes that America is an improbable idea primarily because the application of the texts of the American constitution are contradictory.

The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal. In response to this statement, Quindlen writes, “It is held together by a notion, the notion that all men are created equal, though everyone knows that most men consider themselves better than someone.” This statement displays and supports the idea that America is an improbable concept based on the fact that America is founded on the ideal of all men being created equal. This equality was not extended to women, slaves, and those who did not own land. Therefore, the notion that all men are created equal contradicts itself because it leaves out many of the demographics of which the United States consists. Additionally, the United States has abolished slavery; however, when the Declaration of Independence was originally written stating that all men are created equal, slavery had not been abolished in the United States. The abuse of African-Americans and other people during this era was an atrocity that

concretely proves that during the time that the Founding Fathers wrote the American constitution, all men were not created equal. On this subject, Quindlen says, “Many oft-told stories of the most pluralistic nation on the earth are stories not of tolerance, but of bigotry. Slavery and sweatshops, the burning of crosses and the ostracism of the other.” America was founded on the ideal of equality, but as Quindlen states Americans are no tolerant, rather they have displayed barbarisms throughout their history. Through the use of slavery and sweatshops, Quindlen successfully displays the brutality that contradicts the statement that all men are created equal that was published in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence and supports the notion that America is an improbable idea.
The education systems in the United States also display the idea that America is an improbable idea because social studies classes teach students of the denial of rights of African-Americans, women, and homosexuals. Quindlen writes, “Children learn in social-studies class and in the news of lynching of blacks, the denial of rights to women, and the murders of gay men. It is difficult to know how to convince them that this amounts to “crown thy good with brotherhood,” that amid all the failures is something spectacularly successful.” The notion that children are educated about the carnages and other indecencies of the American society to those who obscure their sense of homogeneity and sameness is ludicrous. Children are expected to crown thy good with brotherhood when homosexual marriages have only just become legal although most of society still does not fully accept their difference from the public ideals, and they witness other atrocities committed by the American society. Quindlen says, “Tolerance is the word used most often when this kind of coexistence succeeds, but tolerance is a vanilla-pudding word, standing for little more than the allowance of letting others live unremarked and unmolested.” This displays the concept that America was founded on the false pretense of tolerance. The American society was supposed to be tolerant of all ethnicities, but as seen throughout the history of the United States, Americans are not tolerant at all. Slavery, the slaughtering of homosexuals, and the lack of women’s rights develop the system that is American society- the existence of tolerance until the tolerance snaps, resulting in discrimination. The American children are taught these errors in judgment; however, American society is always discriminating against one group of people or another. Quindlen uses the quote from New York governor Mario Cuomo, “a community added to individualism” to describe what Quindlen describes as “… a nation founded on a conundrum … These two are our defining ideals; they are also in constant conflict.” A nation cannot be both a community and an individual, but this is what our Founding Fathers have attempted. This shows through the use of allusion to “America the Beautiful” and the use of quotes from political figures that America is an improbable idea.
In “A Quilt of a Country” by Anna Quindlen, the blend of cultures in the melting pot that is the United States additionally proves to be one of the reasons why America is an improbable idea because of the conflicting cultures and concepts embodied by the American population.

Inside the United States, there are Israelites and Jews who are living in the same communities as Muslims and Anti-Semites. Quindlen writes, “What is the point of a nation in which Arab cabbies chauffeur Jewish passengers through the streets of New York—and in which Jewish cabbies chauffeur Arab passengers, too, and yet speak in theory of hatred, one for the other? … Other countries with such divisions have in fact divided into new nations with new names, but not this one, impossibly interwoven even in its hostilities.” Another example Quindlen uses to represent the social divides is of the treatment of the Irish in New England during the generation of her parents’ youth. In the time of the Irish potato famine, to be Irish was to be an outsider and to marry one was to murder one’s social life. Quindlen, who came from a mixed family with an Italian mother and an Irish father, says, “The New York of my children is no more Balkanized, probably less so than the Philadelphia of my father, in which Jewish boys would walk several blocks out of their way to avoid the Irish divide of Chester Avenue … Do the Cambodians and the Mexicans in California coexist less easily today than did the Irish and Italians of

Massachusetts a century ago?” This goes to show that there was a large divide between the Irish and the rest of society in the hierarchical procession of society. This divide was seen 150 years ago, and can still be seen today in the treatment of the homosexuals and other groups in much of this improbable country.
When a society has bared witness to a happening so horrible that members of the society grasp to any strand of hope they can, many people turn to unrealistic ideas and attempt to make them a reality. The Founding Fathers did just that in 1776. Now, stands America, a nation that is called the melting pot and salad bowl. The ideas America was founded upon are improbable because they have been contradicted in the proceedings of American history, the education of the children, and the blend of conflicting cultures in American society. Therefore, through the use of allusions to “America the Beautiful” and other references to history and the Declaration of Independence, Quindlen successfully proves that America is an improbable idea.