10 Reasons To Love America

9. Cars

Cars first appeared in Germany, but it was American Henry Ford who introduced the assembly line method of auto manufacturing that put a car in every garage and made the automotive industry what it is today (or what it was 40 years ago). American auto manufacturing not only supplied Americans with an almost magical transportation method, it supplied millions of Americans with decent-paying jobs in the factories. The American Dream is virtually synonymous with auto manufacture. There is a good tradition of unionized labor and comparatively fair wages. Without this industry, the rust belt may have never been built. We could certainly be much more responsible with our driving habits. Heaps of rusted metal fill up junkyards nationwide and carbon emissions from the burning of oil is a big contributor to greenhouse gases. Knowing what we do now about global warming and pollution makes an oil-based engine seem like a colossal mistake. But in America before anywhere else, the world shrank significantly. Coast-to-coast travel time went from weeks and months to hours and days. Distance ceased to be an issue altogether. The nation came together in the workplace and became linked to friends and relatives thousands of miles away. Cars transformed the nation's entire character and carried the United States strongly through the first half of the 20th century and much of the second.