By The Abbot
We have upon us a new American Crisis; larger in scale than our war of independence and greater in scope than the Second World War. Has the American promise of democracy and liberty been a lie? Why have we fought and died as a nation for the last 250 years if not for freedom and equality for not just ourselves but ultimately for every free man, woman and child that has walked or will walk this earth.
Thomas Paine wrote that, “Tyranny, like hell is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” As Americans, whether liberal, moderate, or conservative, we face a grave threat. An amoral would-be-tyrant with his cowardly sycophants have taken it upon themselves to re-interpret our Constitution as a document of oppression and authoritarianism rather than one of personal liberty and self-government as our founders intended. The fault for this strange and dangerous relativism of law lies with all of us.
Fear
Many Americans are frightened and feel forgotten by their government. We are all afraid. Fear is a base emotion for humans. Fear is conceived in ignorance and brings forth her children hatred, arrogance and greed. Fear has always been the most destructive power on earth. Not even the great might of the entire American nuclear arsenal can compare to the collective desolation a terrified humanity can bring to our world and upon one another.
One unfortunate sadness of Make America Great Again is that nothing great has ever been born from fear. This country’s greatest achievements and its golden eras arise during times of collective national fearlessness. Our founding fathers brought forth this new nation despite incredible fear of death and the British Empire. This nation, when torn in two in 1861, was mended because of brave leadership and the virtue to condemn the great evil of slavery. Our country strove headlong into the first World War and came out the other side of pestilence and death into the august roaring 20s and the prosperity and exuberant joy of that decade. We banded together as an American family to wage war against the most destructive tyranny then known to humankind and fiercely confronted all the terror and evil of Nazi tyranny.
When our country is not afraid; when our leaders stoke brotherhood instead of discord and understanding instead of ignorance – it is then we become great. We went to the moon. We defeated polio. We dominated world art, music and literature. We made the greatest achievements in science, engineering and technology ever seen in our species and we did it together through brave determination. Any promise to make America great through fear, hate and anger is an empty one.
Americans have long been known and admired for our ingenuity, our creativity, and our conception of what free people are truly capable of when we help and support one another – no matter what. We have allowed a rogue group of men and women to take our rights, and to distort our freedom. Since the great hope of 1776 and our fledgling experiment of self-government, we have slowly allowed that hope and our power to slip slowly through our own fingers. We have grown lazy and fat in our blissful ignorance. We have relied on others to make up our minds because some have taken it upon themselves to encourage us to fear our own reason- our own mind – our own eyes. We have forfeited our democracy to billionaires and rich corporations. Fear is only displaced by knowledge, wisdom and reason and unlike fear, these virtues require hard work to gain and maintain.
We find ourselves caught in the jaws of civil discord not seen on this continent since the turbulent years of the 1960s. Then, as now, political leadership was dependent on fear to maintain power. Fear of other races, fear of integration, fear of newly out of the closet gays and lesbians, fear of women defining their own destinies, fear of science, fear of communism.
A Perilous Ship of State
The world turns and still we find ourselves stagnant and stuck in the same place. As long as fear rather than reason rules our choices, the great ship of our nation shall remain in the doldrums of democracy. Without the wind of knowledge to billow our sails, we stay stuck in a wide sargasso sea of our own making. We hunger and thirst for direction from our captains and rather than tell us to hoist the main sails, empty the ballast, swab the deck and follow the star to lead us ahead- our captains point their fingers at each other, or worse, their own crew, as the cause of our immobile ship of state.
“It’s immigrants and refugees taking our jobs and our resources!” shouts our captains. And we rush to throw the immigrants and refugees overboard, but our sails do not billow, our rudder does not move.
“It’s the gays and the trans and the drag queens!” cries the captains. And we again clamor to throw them into the sea, and again, we do not budge.
“It’s the left…it’s the right…it’s the socialists…it’s the nationalists!” scream those captains. And still, we rush to throw them overboard too. But what we have all now failed to realize is we are now all in the sea looking up at our ship as our captains look down upon us -all drowning.
The great sadness in the American debate is not only have we all been thrown overboard by our own family, friends, and neighbors at the insistence of those who care only for power and money, but we have also been doing it consistently and unknowingly for decades. We have lost sight of our purpose together. It was the most fervent wish of the first Americans that we work together to build this great American dream.
The Preamble Revisited
The preamble to our Constitution, a document that has in recent years, become the rallying cry of many people who have never read it, can leave no doubt of the kind of country envisioned for us and our children.
“We the people of the United States”- This was not we the white Protestant men, or we the rich men with land, or we the corporations, or we the billionaires or we the Republicans or we the Democrats. It was we, the people. You. Me. Your liberal gay neighbor. Your conservative straight cousin. Your atheist nephew. Your extra Christian aunt. All of us. Together. Working through a life that does not promise happiness or prosperity without our collective cooperation and recognition of what is required for a good life or in other words-
“In order to form a more perfect union”- define those things necessary for almost everyone to enjoy a good, peaceful, quiet, just and prosperous life as we work together to: “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
The great and delicate gift of democracy requires our constant vigilance and care, and it is only together we can end this tide of subjugation to an ultra-conservative elite whose sole aim is to deprive the poor, the working class and the remainder of the middle class of our fundamental and inalienable freedoms.
We are all indeed on the very brink of forever losing our country. It matters not whether you do or do not support Donald Trump. A nation that has lost its purpose for existence, its essence, its soul transforms into something that only appears to be America. It is a plastic idol of Jesus strewn with star-spangled, red, white and blue bunting who cradles a flag-draped bald eagle in a basket made from machine guns. This is not a country for everyone but only some of us. And that is not good enough.
America the Beautiful
Another unfortunate irony of “Make America Great Again” is that those who believe in it do not understand that in addition to fearlessness, a dedicated cultivation of its beauty is required for its greatness. I do not mean solely our majestic, purple mountains or amber waves of grain. I mean the beauty of all our people and our way of life now endangered. Being and staying beautiful is not easy. Ask any woman who spent two-hours getting ready for a date, or any man who worked out for years to compete at the Olympics. Ask any artist how much time went in to learning drawing and painting or a pianist how many hours of practice went in to playing a piece of music in a manner that seemed effortless. Every single one of them would tell you that it took significant work. And now a group of our American brothers and sisters are blindly following a man who has promised “greatness” through fear and without work by following a wide road of populism and scapegoating rather than the hard truth that greatness, and our nation’s beauty is dependent on our collective wisdom, hard work and sacrifice.
We, unlike the French, or the Swedes or the Chinese, do not need to be tied to a nationality but can create our own. Celebrating and honoring the many wonderful cultures, countries, religions, and creeds that make up our nation can still be done under an umbrella of one American culture. The political group that most clearly defines that culture wins and right now, this is a group of men and women who have chosen an easy, wide road towards how we define America. According to their platform, we are supposed to be white, straight, only one of two genders, Christian, English-speaking, pseudo-patriotic in that we wear the flag as underwear, or a bikini or idolize it by hugging it, and buy into the lie that everyone can be a billionaire with enough hard work. One of the greatest hoodwinks thus far perpetrated on the American people has been convincing all of us who have already worked hard our whole lives long that supporting tax cuts for rich, entitled, “self-made” millionaires, and corporate and banking deregulation are great ideas and that unions, and tax cuts for the poor and middle class are bad ideas. Allowing corporations and financial giants any say in the governing of our country or themselves is like allowing the residents of a prison mental hospital to define the criteria needed for parole.
Our national message must remind all Americans what this country is supposed to be about. It is time for the remaining men and women of reason stuck in a cataclysmic tug of war take back what is ours – the American ethos.
Any attempt to reclaim that ethos will require significant effort to make all of us understand how hard and narrow the road to greatness really is. America is multi-colored and multi-cultural, and we take great pride in this vast spectrum. We honor one another’s right to their opinion, their own mind, and their own heart. We delight in self-expression- whether that be in a cowboy hat, a police officer’s uniform, a tutu, a football helmet, a Dior gown or a fabulous wig. We respect the right and liberty of any citizen of this country to practice whatever religion or non-religion they want, so long as they do not attempt to indoctrinate and infiltrate our mechanisms of governance and public education. We are a nation that dozens of cultures, all with their own languages and livelihoods, have colonized and governed. From 20,000 years ago when the first humans trekked across a now-vanished land bridge from Siberia, until today’s migrant workers, the North American continent has been one filled with beautiful civilizations.
Reclaiming the Dignity of Work
We are a nation who takes the best of every other nation and augments it through our fearlessness, and our freedom. We believe in the dignity of work – all work and all workers- and acknowledge that no man or woman, no matter how hard they worked ever did it alone. It is about both blue-collar and white-collar workers since both owe their paychecks to someone else and both spend 40 or more hours a week in the employ of another, and in a job they hate. Distinguishing between these workers has done nothing but divide a people who all share the same joys, the same dreams and the same sorrows. It does not matter if you build bridges, do someone’s taxes, clean bathrooms, perform open heart surgery, work on an assembly line, write legal briefs, or drive a truck across country. We each bring something – big or small to a nation that needs every single one of us to contribute something good. Despite how much the super-rich claim their wealth to be self-made, they quickly forget the institutional vehicles that allowed them to build that wealth. This includes a stable country of laws and regulations. What would Elon Musk be if not for patents to protect his property or where would Jeff Bezos be without safe roads, the internet, or airports? The American people have paid for, built, and maintained all of our infrastructure. Most importantly, America has a middle class capable of consuming enough to make these men and women super rich by paying for those vehicles of civilization in the first place.
What makes us great is our ingenuity, our “can-do” spirit, and most of all, our ability to lead the world in science, technology, education, art, literature, music, and athletics. I would like to ask this now of all Americans but most especially to those who felt determined to vote once again for Donald Trump – Can we be a nation fostering the greatest culture on earth, with the greatest scientists on earth and with the most abundant food and renewable fuels on earth and do so without having to limit one another? Is taking away the rights of other Americans needed to create and keep America as the leading ideal in our world? Ask yourselves, is it worth destroying half our country to allow only one mind, one culture, and one man to rule it indefinitely? When you think of American greatness is it cowering behind the massive red tie of Trump and the petticoats of his progeny or is it out in front leading, and shaping the world and not succumbing to it? When America was “great”, we were fearless and did not shrink from that responsibility.
The road ahead is hard and the way narrow but in order to build a lasting nation, a nation worth fighting and dying for, a nation that will in the centuries to come be the leader in what is to be the human race’s expansion beyond this planet and farther- we must stop our fighting, halt our angry rhetoric, cease these destructive principles and bravely determine together whether we want to live as a nation of free, enlightened people as our founders dreamed or die by the suicide that Lincoln feared.
