MADE IN AMERICA

     Last night I answered the phone without my usual check on the number. It turned out to be a poll related to the candidate for the School Board, with questions as to my views on charter schools and public funds. The question that stood out in my mind was the one now appearing on forms, including the census form. It asks for my origin, naming a few such as Eastern European, Asian, with breakdowns there, Black, Hispanic, etc. I asked, kind of wistfully, 'why can it not be just plain old American?"
     What is wrong with that? The fact that my ancestors prior to arrival here in the late 1890's and early  1900's came from Eastern Europe does not make them something different from an American whose ancestors came from Haiti, or Samoa, or England, or Nigeria, or Spain, or anywhere. How about we all call ourselves American, for that is what we most emphatically are - or should be. It is the fact that we have forgotten that, or ignored it, or been persuaded to ignore it, that is symbolic of the mess we are in at present. 
     We have forgotten that we all are made in America, whenever we or family first arrived, from where, or why. It matters not the color, the religion, the race, the mix of races, the origin - or at least it should not - for we are all Americans, each and every one of us with all retaining the rights of an American citizen. As an aside, I am often tempted to write that I am a native Hawaiian for that is my most absolute favorite place in the world! And that would still keep me in the American pile!!
     So where and when and how did we go wrong? It went off the rails when we elected our first black president. The venom outmatched the pride. The anger overwhelmed those who said, "So what? This is America." But this is also the America which allowed - and still allows - a poisonous hatred to run in the veins of citizens. In 2020 we are not only incapable of passing a law making lynching a federal crime - thank you for that Republicans! - but we are also allowing it to return!!! Real lynchings! Real nooses being placed in places meant to terrorize and intimidate. And let us not forget that Leo Frank was a white Jewish young man lynched by howling mobs on a false accusation of rape of a white teenaged woman.
     This is the same America which allowed a drunken creepy Gibson to speak his filthy anti Semitism, but also added to it when he asked Wynona Ryder if she was an "oven dodger", meaning the ovens and crematoria used by the Nazis to burn the bodies of the millions of Jews they slaughtered. This, by an American who calls himself a patriot. This from an American who boasts of his intense religion.
     That, too, is America, all made in America and we need to choose, to throw down our final offers and answers - and questions- and choose, stand forth, stand proud, and fight the hate that is rusting our country from within, that has pushed us along a terribly dangerous and ugly road. We have already lost the value and respect of that term, American, overseas, and are quickly destroying its value here. We have imported the ugliness of nationalism, populism, extremism, from overseas and topped off with our own ingrown and growing hatred and paranoia. Must we build on top of that or can we not implode it from within, set aside those feelings that are used by ugly people who have no true interest in America remaining as such, as the United States that welcomes all with the Lady of the Harbor?
     "Now we are engaged in a great civil war..." Thus spoke a great American, almost two centuries ago and still, we have not fully accepted that premise, or worse, rejected it. We have aided in its probable demise by allowing a totally misfit person in as President, a man with no business there. How shameful is it that distinguished Americans who have served their country, be it in politics, the media, the armed services, have resigned in droves, driven out by animosity towards them, by the inability to work with such a corrupt and anti American administration, the courage to speak out, to whistle blow, to lose their jobs for a higher goal.
     How shameful, how awful, is it that this man is described by well known people, respectable people, as a "moron, an imbecile" according to the very definition of those words? How shameful is it to have an illegitimate President who speaks only in terms of hatred, in prejudicial memes and tropes, who lives for the snarky laughs and cheers that greet his most hateful phrases, who lies and lies and then excuses them as the backlash to them rises in volume.
     Obama used these words very well just the other day. "Trump..... was practicing a "shambolic, disorganized, mean-spirited approach to government" that put in existential danger American values,..... a structure that supports them that has not just differed in terms of policy but has gone at the very foundations of who we are and who we should be, ....."That actively promotes division. And that considers some American in this country more real than others," Are we willing to allow this to continue, or will we remember, push that glorious idea, that we are all made in America? Remember the song "Look for the Union label"? Well, let us look for the Union label again, the one which is the union of the states into the United States, the Union we fought so hard, so tragically, to retain and build even stronger.
     Want to be well? Want to be safe? First of all, put on those masks and socially distance and stop being stupidly stubborn in a way that increases the losses. Think about the meaning of American citizen. And think carefully about your votes. Demand the right. Fulfill the right. Watch over that right, for as the road moves today, if we do not use that right, we will lose it. VOTE!!