If you wanted a letter delivered to San Francisco in the 1800s, the Pony Express would deliver it about two months after you mailed it.,
Today, a send button takes less than a second.
You purchased from the Sears Roebuck catalogue until large department stores took their place. Then, finally, Amazon arrived and your world continued to evolve.
This is called progress. Improvements are always improved. There are no entities that have ever succeeded. or societies that have ever flourished by looking in the rear-view mirror.
But that’s what MAGA proponents urge us to do. “Make America Great Again” is their call to reverse course for how it used to be. It is a mindless concept; its shallowness is exposed when asked to define greatness or exactly “How it used to be.”
It’s time for the MAGA folks to tell us what we need to be made great again. They can’t because their capacity for understanding national greatness is blunted by the mindless repetition of inane slogans floated like dog whistles by a malevolent Pied Piper.
In November 2016, this country elected to its highest office an ignorant individual who, among his other misdeeds, revisited a practice that long lay dormant in the recesses of our mind.
The belief of white male supremacy revealed its ugly head with the blessing of one who referred to the influx of desperate human beings as a collective mob of brown-skinned invaders who were druggies, murderers and rapists intent on violating our women..
He lamented the arrival of brown-skinned people from “shit-hole countries” who intend to destroy our country or poison our national blood stream. He said he wished more people would come from Norway. And he found a lot of people under those red hats who thought the same way.
Our founding fathers committed us to the eradication of the old English class system. With the Declaration of Independence, they found the key to the door to national greatness by pronouncing that all men were created equal in the eyes of our creator with equal and unalienable rights. The concept of greatness need not be resurrected again.
Black slaves were the first and most obvious to be excluded from the newly established American hierarchy. Others followed. Arguably, a caste system eventually took root in the fledging colonies that made it difficult to escape the slot to which one was allotted.
This caste system continues to bedevil our society today. It is so imbued that we don’t realize it, and we’d hotly deny it if we’re challenged. But it exists and is manifested in our struggle with immigration policies today.
There are those who are convinced of the primacy of the white race and are disturbed by the integration of people different from them entering their world. There are people who demand English be spoken or who are offended by Spanish signs at the voting booth and supermarkets.
We hear, “Go back to where you belong. You are not wanted in our country.” The people who want to make America great again are the same people keeping themselves from realizing the dream to which they aspire.
In their willful ignorance, they fail to understand that our country is not just a physical entity with defined boundaries. Our country is an ideal. Our country is a haven of hope for downtrodden masses yearning to breathe free.
True greatness is not measured only in power, wealth or force of arms. Our country is great because of the lighted lamp on the upraised arm of the Lady of the Harbor.
Our country is great because it is committed to the struggle to become that “Shining City on the Hill” envisioned by the founders of the Plymouth Colony some 400 years ago.
Would that the Red Hats come to understand that.
John Klumpp
Sparta