THE UN-AMERICAN AMERICAN
First and foremost, do not judge us by the low standard set by the dingbat in the White House. Remember that the majority of voters did not elect him – he was selected and installed by a cabal beyond our control. Many of us were horrified on the day Mr. Bush raised his right hand and swore his oath. We knew trouble would come, though we could not predict what form it might take. But we knew.
First and foremost, do not judge us by the low standard set by the dingbat in the White House. Remember that the majority of voters did not elect him – he was selected and installed by a cabal beyond our control. Many of us were horrified on the day Mr. Bush raised his right hand and swore his oath. We knew trouble would come, though we could not predict what form it might take. But we knew.
The black and white worldview trumpeted by Rush Limbaugh and the talking heads on Fox news is fodder for a small but vocal minority. Lost in the cacophony created by Limbaugh and his ilk are the values and aspirations of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. The superficial and trivial divert our collective attention from the important issues of the day; we become more exercised and energized by the latest reality TV craze than we do when our government weakens the Bill of Rights in the name of protecting us from terrorists. Instead of gathering in the streets in united protest, we sit in our darkened living rooms, isolated, transfixed and pacified by the images on our oversized television screens.
Are we nuts or merely asleep? Too often it’s hard to tell.
Four years into the millennium we present ourselves to the world more as a menace than a light shining through the darkness; we bluster and blunder like a schoolyard bully. The planet is still round, as far as anyone knows, and yet we demand that our neighbors choose a side, declare that they are either for us or against us.
When and why did we hit the wall, run out of ideas and idealism, lose sight of our promise? How do average Americans convince the world that we are not mirror images of our political and cultural leaders? Indeed, how do we convince you that we are not the arrogant buffoons we seem to be when we tramp the streets of your cities and towns?
Just when I think we have sunk to the bedrock, I meet someone who restores my faith in America’s potential; someone who believes that a drastic change in direction is long overdue; someone who has traveled enough and read enough to preserve the ability to think for himself; someone who recognizes our hypocrisy and myopia and yet clings to the belief that we might yet become a nation among nations, an equal among equals on a planet desperate for cooperation and community; someone who understands that to think such thoughts is not un-American or anti-American or subversive, but is in fact quintessentially American.
Our essentially generous and fair national character is still alive, best expressed by Whitman and Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Lincoln and FDR, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, Robert Johnson and Bruce Springsteen, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Mead, William O. Douglas and Robert Kennedy and Rosa Parks, in words and deeds that penetrate beyond the veil of myth.
And here’s a notion sure to arouse the ire of the Fox brigade: if the world cannot see the essential decency in the American character, the fault lies with America, not the world.
I like to think that we still have the character of Atticus Finch in us, in places large and small, cosmopolitan and provincial, where men and women instinctively protect the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, and the disenfranchised from the privileged; where men and women stand on principle, no matter the cost to themselves.
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