What is ‘America’? Who are we, as ‘Americans’?
Freedom! Right? Liberty? Sure.. and those two are no small things. But what a lot of people leave out is “Equality” without which, there is NO freedom or Liberty. This isn’t equality in the sense of Socialism (so keep your pants on!) but equality of opportunity and even access where the public sphere is concerned. If you disagree, then how much so? Does equality have NO place in our democracy? In what way is it acceptable to use that word (and no other)?
We are a great country but we are an experiment. We are on-going and open-ended. We can create new laws and discard laws that are no longer applicable. We can fashion ourselves as a particular people of a particular hue if we so desire or we can abolish all such favoritism in any and all forms. We can use legislation to define what “America” is, from a democratically chosen welfare state to a democratically chosen Theocracy.. it at least seems there is really no limit, without regard to the Bill of Rights or the Constitution, to what we may make of ourselves with the proper justification and the ‘right’ interpretation.
We can make laws that stand like fussy mothers over us, peering at all we do with gentle (and sometimes not so gentle) ‘tut-tut’s’ whenever we begin to err outside the lines. “You cannot drive faster than this limit.. because you are children!”, “You cannot drink until you reach a certain age.. because you cannot be trusted to be responsible”, “You cannot marry whoever you wish to marry because WE KNOW BETTER than you in these affairs, silly little snotty brat!”, “There’s no way we, as your parents and guardians, will allow you to make up your own mind about smoking pot!” and “We are right and you are wrong, wrong, wrong.. you cannot have birth control and abortions are just your immature, childish ways of trying to avoid your responsibility – after all, you can’t have your cake and eat it too!”.
Our people span the spectrum from the quiet and oft-unheard public to loud-mouths and fire-brands. Religious zealots and moderates, peacemakers.. to War-hawks and War-profiteers all reading from the same staid book. We have citizens who don’t speak English, who weren’t born here but who work hard and pay taxes and we have welfare queens and theifs, criminals. We have the poor and the extremely poor, living day to day in an existence on the street that would be jarring to most of us. And we have the extremely rich who are immune to the problems and stress that most of us face on a daily basis. And honestly, there is room for all of us. In America, we are all brothers and sisters. America is something that ties and binds us together, spanning politics and racial divides and everything from gender to education, world-view or philosophy must take a back-seat to the fact that we are all Americans, and there is room under this tent.. this great experiment for all of us.
I don’t have to like what you say, or how you think.. but I stand by your right to express your thoughts and practice your beliefs.
We often hear someone say something along the lines of, “Well that isn’t the America I grew up in” or “That’s not just unpatriotic, that’s un-american!”, “We need to get back to who we were. We need to get back to America!”? “That person doesn’t understand America” or “That person is distinctly, un-american!”These phrases and questions, rhetorical and dead serious, come mostly from politicians. These tools are meant to rouse up one group against another, or one idea against another. To exclude one group or set of ideas and principles from another in order to alienate them. Sometimes to shame them or ridicule them. To show them the door and tell them, politely or not so much, “Get.. out!”.
What if we were to make a college drinking game out of this while listening to our favorite ideological heroes. Which groups would be drunker, faster?
I wonder?
Dropping all Pretense 