There’s a Paul Simon song, I believe it is “Have a Good Time,” in which these lines (or something like very like them, if my memory is inaccurate) occur:
God bless the U. S. A.—
God bless our standard of living.
Let’s keep it that way.
I really like Paul Simon’s work, but these lines mean even more to me, considering today’s political climate.
The slogan of the rightwing nutjobs is MAGA—Make American Great Again.
Well, I’m a liberal, and as it happens, I think the slogan is stupid. I think America is already great.
Don’t get me wrong. We have problems, and we have made serious mistakes. One of the worst of these problems is institutionalized racism—and anyone who says it doesn’t exist is lying, either from deliberate malice, or because they have been lied to so insistently they are ignorant of the facts.
Another extremely serious problem is the dominance of money in politics. There’s a whole crowd of people who count their money in the billions, and who never gave a thing back to their country or to anybody else. There’s a whole crowd of people who made money by twisting money, not by contributing anything of value. There’s another whole crowd who will do anything, even let their workers die from exposure to serious pathogens, or destroy their own country, in order to gain more money for themselves. These two crowds tend to run together. What they have in common is a willingness to cause destruction and suffering for other people and their own country so long as they keep making obscene amounts of money.
These are not the only problems we have, but they are two of our biggest ones.
Any decent citizen, whether conservative or liberal, ought to be against the money-chasers. No decent human is willing to treat another human, whatever his or her color, as less than human, as deserving less justice than anyone else. Those are simply facts, and if you argue against them, no matter how you twist and turn the words, you are a liar.
But those problems do not mean America is not great. I will tell you what’s great about America: Here we have this whole huge country, and people can move about freely over the whole country, confident that they have freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship (or from it, if we desire), freedom of movement.
Of course these freedoms are not as available to blacks or Japanese or native Americans or other “people of color” as the current phrasing puts it as they are to white middle-class people who identify themselves as “Christian.” (Notice I didn’t say they were Christians. I just said they claim they are.) That goes right back to the problems that we absolutely must solve.
But when I was a kid I grew up in a place where they was peace and safety and continuity. I could trust that no war was going to come along and blow up my family, that if I obeyed the law and practiced simple respect and courtesy to others, I would not be arrested and thrown in jail.
I went to school, and I really hated school. Probably most people of my age could say the same thing. Before I started school, I wanted more than anything to go to school. I thought it was where you learned things. But when I finally got to school, I discovered that nobody really care about educating children (except a few, a very few, good teachers). School was just a place where they kept you for 12 years, herded you around like cattle, and—in Mississippi, at least—lied to you about racial problems and pretended there weren’t any. Still, I did learn a few things. And respect and courtesy were considered valuable, even if some of the nastier types made exceptions for race.
(I vividly remember walking back from high school one day and an old black man, walking my way on the sidewalk, stepped down and took off his hat. I had been brought up to respect my elders, and I could not understand why he was deferring to me even though I was much younger. That was my introduction to institutionalized racism. Till that moment, it had been kept out of my sight.)
Here’s my point: We just dropped my grandson off for the day at a week-long camp out in the woods (we pick him up in the evenings, bring him back in the mornings). He loves it. He loves it even better than school. He gets to DO things, run around in the woods, learn about insects and animals and plants. But he likes school too.
You see, school has gotten better, at least out here in California it has. They pay attention now to what kids really need. The days of treating them like herds of cattle are gone. This boy is growing up with GOOD memories of school and of camp. He is growing up in an America that has a lot of the advantages my America had, in terms of safety and opportunity.
And that’s what American does well. It corrects its mistakes. At its best, this country provides children a safe place to grow up and to learn, a place with opportunity and richness. And what I want to say is Let’s Keep It That Way. My grandson doesn’t care what color his friends are, or where their great-grandparents came from. He trusts the world we are bringing him into to provide what he needs. Let’s Keep It That Way.
Let’s keep providing a safe stable environment for our children to grow and develop in, and let’s keep solving our problems so that more and more children are able to grow up that way.
There are some liars out there, some radicals who want to cause internal war and disruption. They are threatening to shoot the people they disagree with. They call themselves “Christians” sometimes. They call themselves “conservatives.” But they are not. They are radicals, who want to cause trouble and strife and upheaval. They follow a proven liar, a man who cares for nobody but himself. They want to tear the country apart.
A vote is coming. Right now the Democrats are the true conservatives, and the radicals are the liars who call themselves conservatives. The people who admire a murdering Russian tyrant. The people who praise Adolf Hitler, and proudly call themselves Nazis and supremacists.
They are the ones advocating for violence, for overthrowing this stable and rich environment for our children. I urge you, whether you are an old-style conservative or a liberal, to look at who is really trying to destabilize our country and who is trying to keep it as great as it has always been.
I urge you to vote, not necessarily by party-line, but according to what you want for this country. Do you want anger, hatred, violence, and overthrow? Is that what you want for your children?
No. Me neither. I think the proper slogan for this coming election ought to be a reminder that however dissatisfied by some things we might be, we want to keep things peaceful and steady and improving for the sake of our children. If the Democrats were smart, they would not argue with the republican any more, because it’s pointless. They would simply remind people that they are the ones who want to keep the peace, and the Nazis, as always, are the ones who want war. Haven’t we already fought this battle? Do we want to have to fight it all over again?
It’s the extreme right-wingers who want to overthrow what we have, and they pretend it’s because we need to make America great again. I say they lie. I say that it is already great.
And I say LET’S KEEP IT THAT WAY.