I started this entry earlier today, then trashed it. I began trying to explain how I don’t understand what the GOP/Tea Partiers/Libertarians have against most of America.
You know, take workplace power away from public employees, privatize Medicare, further restrict access to abortion, cut taxes for the rich, expect the middle and lower echelons of earners to pay more, and whatever you do, DON’T RAISE TAXES, even if state and federal budgets require it. See, there I go again. I just don’t understand it.
The kernel of the idea for this entry came a few days ago in quiet response to a conservative Facebook post from a friend who celebrated something about the sanctity of the US Constitution.
And I thought, “You know, I love the Constitution. It was a beautiful idea whose time had come. It is a tribute to Enlightenment thinkers in the ‘old country’ and our very own founding fathers. It has been copied by so many nations around the world. We should be proud!’
And I am. Still, I thought, it isn’t the Constitution that lights me up about this place. It’s something else. It’s something somehow richer.
First, the Constitution is a flawed document. Looking at the original with the clauses struck out through amendments, shows how much actually has been changed. I mean, those guys back then counted black folks as two-thirds of a white American. I’m sure most of them thought that was a revolutionary liberal accomplishment.
For me, America is something beyond a document. America, for me, has a certain feel. It’s a feel that anybody can be anything she or he wants. It’s a feel that kids won’t go to bed hungry and that anybody who wants to go to college can. It’s a feel that everybody ought to have a good job. Everybody ought to vote. We all should pull together to be sure even the least among us has opportunity.
Maybe those ideas are glorified in the Declaration of Independence, but they don’t really come through in the Constitution. The Constitution is about law, as it should be. My America is about fairness and doing what’s best for the people.
America today, I am sorry to say, is really run by global corporations. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said just this week that the business of Congress is controlled by corporate money. In another day we said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” Now it’s more like what’s good for GE, Mobile-Exxon, and Bank of America is good for America. Legislation comes to be because some corporation wants a favor from the government: a tax break, a tax loophole, an angle on a growing market, reduction of competition, taking power away from workers.
I don’t like it. It doesn’t seem fair. And I’m amazed at the ability of newly elected folks to get their agenda going.
I just want to know how much of this is what Americans want and how much of this is what the folks who lobby politicians want? They are not mutually compatible.
America for me isn’t the Constitution, though it is surely important.
America for me is the place where people are treated fairly and with respect and can achieve impossible dreams.
I get the feeling that in today’s political climate, some very important impossible dreams achieved by our foremothers and forefathers are being reduced to make life more profitable for corporations.
And I find that damned depressing.
Today’s elder idea:
O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's,
Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.
excerpt from Langston Hughes
“Let America Be America Again”
image: stolen off the internet
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