Resilient America: An Immigrant Examines Our Nation’s Adaptive Continuity

Resilient America follows the author's progressive Americanization, often despite discouraged, sometimes despairing views about national decline and the future of their country voiced by the native-born. As a much-traveled immigrant (and long a citizen), he sees it differently. He compares and contrasts cultures and experiences from his earlier life with those in the United States. He observes the march of American history and concludes that all too often these concerned Americans lack a sense of that history. Their predecessors have worried since the Republic's earliest days. Yet the resilient Republic marches on, adapting, evolving, changing.

The author examines claims that the United States has peaked and that its national character is insubstantial. He observes resilience and adaptability instead, and an original, persistent, vigorous character. He notes recessions and depressions occurring at regular intervals. Each time, Americans have claimed that the sky was falling. Each time the country resuscitated, returned to its prosperous, profligate ways and paved the way for the next downturn. The country's moral, spiritual and institutional conditions have also conjured up periodically the falling of the sky, only to regain their equilibrium. The author explores the profounder meaning of these cyclical consistencies.

The cumulative effect of dejected rhetoric generates cynicism and resignation, infects the susceptible and undermines the communitarian solidarity which powers American life. But most complaints don't stand up to thoughtful, informed critique. Rather, a centered, enduring, self-renewing nation emerges, leading to qualified optimism (and to the author's deepening acculturation). These considerations motivate Resilient America.

Alexander Kugushev was born in France, of Russian parents, and educated successively in Yugoslavia, Austria, Switzerland, and Argentina. The son of political émigrés, growing up in a Europe rent by conflicts between the two World Wars, he experienced a fair share of life’s ups and downs. As a boy and into his early teens, he lived through World War II, the defining experience of his life.

He lost his father as a small child and his compassionate mother taught him respect for all life and regard for the equality of all people. She also inculcated love of music. From his grandfather he learned that we can all excel and that there is no ceiling to what we should know. From his years in Switzerland he learned devotion to democracy. From his two emigrations, to Argentina and to the United States, he learned about the contradictions and paradoxes of life. His Yankee wife taught him much about America and about the possibility of pursuing happiness (and of even catching it).

He is a journalist by trade and a publisher by profession, having published educational materials in the United States for over forty years, in print and on the internet. He is a committed naturalized American, speaks seven languages and has traveled extensively throughout his life, at this point to over seventy countries. He reads omnivorously and is a dedicated outdoorsman. He lives in Menlo Park, in Northern California.