“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she with silent lips.
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” — The words on a plaque dedicated to the Statue of Liberty
The United States proudly pointed to those beautiful welcoming words on our Statue of Liberty since those words were penned. Those words shout to the world that the United States is a kind nation.
If we consider those words with those of our most profound amendment of Bill of Rights our self-imposed prohibition against cruel punishments then the only way to understand the Trump era is that of a national apostasy. If we relent to the Trump administration on this, America is lost for all but history books.
And if we can’t make those words stick, then in analysis by historians of the future will have no conclusion but to say kindness as a governing principle is a hopeless romantic notion that only the naive could accept.
Let me acknowledge to those who would say that the United States has NEVER lived to those words. For those who would say that United States has been cruel and racist from its inception, that white supremacy, racism, slavery, Jim Crow laws, persistent race based police brutality — among other crimes are all evidence that we never lived up to the promise of our most profound words, that they are right.
If I may rewrite the profound words of MLK, Jr that the “moral arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice,” that the moral arc of United States has been long but bends towards the fulfillment of our most profound hopes and dreams, the hope of fulfillment of those words. Yes, we have failed to achieve what our words promise.
But we have worked at a painstakingly slow pace to fulfill the promise that United States would be a kind country, that we would resist our most cruel instincts.
Our failures are duly noted. But what Cuccinelli said today for once acknowledges that the right wing are hostile to America’s promise. For once the right wing now acknowledges that they are moral traitors to the promise of our words. Today the Trump administration has announced that they despise the aims of the American promise.
They have not merely spoken that we may never fulfill the promise of our most profound words, but that the right wing does not desire the fulfillment of that promise and that they wish to obstruct attempts to live up to our promise.
Thus we must understand Cuccinelli’s words to be a declaration or moral war against the United States of America. If we in the so-called “resistance” have any chance in defeating Trumpism we must understand that residing in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is an overt threat against the aspirational soul of the United States.
Cuccinelli’s call to alter America’s promise must be understood as nothing short of an unpatriotic America-hating assault on the values this country strives to achieve.
Trumpism, through the hostile language of Ken Cuccinelli has now confessed its anti-American aims. Know that. Acknowledge that. And arm yourself appropriately to withstand that.
If you ever uttered the words “God bless America,” you are now duty bound to work in behalf of the God you pleaded to for that blessing, by using all tools at your disposal to rid the American government of all vestiges of moral treason Trumpism has announced itself to represent.