Written by Igor Goldkind
America
is a melting pot goes the cliche, but it’s not a melting pot of
people and cultures. Instead, America is a melting pot of people’s
idealization of America. A merging of hopes and aspirations from all
four corners of the world. All of the immigrants who came to America
for whatever reason, imagined what this country represented, my
Russian grandfather included. As a youth, he
had posters of Hollywood film stars pasted on his walls. He had
always dreamed of escaping the Jewish pogroms and escaping to
America, the land of the Free, where people could work hard and
prosper. He imagined the land where he wanted to live, to escape to,
long before he had touched feet on American soil. It was his desire
to pursue his dream, his optimistic illusion that moved him. So it
was with the Irish, the Germans, the Russians, the Italians, the
French, the English, the Spanish, the Indians, the Vietnamese, the
Japanese, the Chinese and so forth. Wave upon wave of immigrants
arriving literally on the wings of a prayer: that there might be a
better life here for them and their families.
From
the onset immigrants wanted to conform, to fit into this culture.
When people are diverse, they strive to be the same and when people
are the same they strive to be distinguished. Immigrants want to
become American as fast as possible, or at least they want their
children to be as a natural progression. When I asked my grandfather
to teach me Russian he refused telling me that it was the language
of the old country and best forgotten along with the victims of the
Cossack pogroms he and my grandmother had left behind. This was the
land of their aspirations and embraced whatever culture they could
touch. More often than not, it was the aspirations of the previous
generation of immigrants they embraced, that still lingered in the
atmosphere like the scent from a million flowers. It was within this
churn of dreams that America was invented.
This
was the living, breathing American idealism that seamlessly
overlapped the original Anglo-Protestant American idealism of the
post-Enlightenment both confirming and revitalizing the ideal of
America. What America really is, what it really represents is
refreshed and reinvigorated with each and every new wave of
immigrants. Refugees come here escaping war and tyranny because until
this past year, this nation was the safe harbor of Liberty. This is
why immigrants are so vital to our democracy and why Trump is so
horrifically wrong to hinder their entry. It is optimism of the
immigrant, their aspirations, their idealism, that refreshes our
democracy and reminds us what is truly great about America and
Americans. Not our jingoism (every nation state has that), but our
openness to the other we may not first understand and our willingness
to change and be changed by the world turning round.
The
Black Panthers, the usual right wing's bugbear, at their worst fought
for the right to bear arms (as provided by the Second Amendment) and
to not be harassed by the Oakland police. They armed themselves to
protect their civil rights and to protect themselves from racist
police brutality. Don't believe me? Read your history and read the
works of Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton and
Malcolm X. All were fighting for their American civil rights as
provided by and guaranteed in the text of the U.S. Constitution, the
highest law of the land.
Even
the destruction of property isn't prohibited by the Constitution but
by other more localized laws. However, constitutional law trumps
federal law, state law, county law and city law. If it's not spelt
out in the Constitution then it has been down to the legal tradition
to work it out through the enforcement of lower court decisions all
the way to the Supreme Court, if need be. But those laws of
governance and the rights of man are spelt out, such as the right to
free speech, the right to dissent, the right to pursue one's
happiness without deterrence and the right to practice any religion
without harassment; it stands above any other law that has been
passed locally or otherwise.
The
U.S. Constitution (and its accompanying Bill of Rights and
Declaration of Independence), are by their very existence if not
definition, progressive documents. They were all written, argued
about and voted on to progress us beyond a decadent monarchy, church
and systems of government that had existed for a millennium at least
previously (with perhaps the exception of the short-lived English
Civil War). They were also the rules of governance, not
anti-government, but an equitable governance that assured the
democratic representation of all citizens, documented or not.
If,
on the other hand, you are terrified of change, resistant to progress
and always proclaim the past as superior to the present, then you are
conservative, but no longer of the right. If you were successfully
transferred to the distant past, you would have been a Tory resisting
the radical, never before tried, severance from the King and the
religious establishment. You would have gone as far as to collude
with our foreign enemies, like Benedict Arnold and Donald Trump did
to undermine our democratic institutions and betray the Constitution
that both had sworn to protect.
So
much clarity is lost when we succumb to counterfactual history. In
this case, “counterfactual” meaning, not only backward looking
narratives that are factually inaccurate, but contrived narratives
that actually defy and contradict the tenets they are meant to
illustrate. Examples include the right wing attempt to reattach
church and state with the preposterous notion that our history is
Judeo-Christian just because a lot of Christians live and practice
here. As well they should as the first amendment guarantees the right
to worship anyway you want but NOT deny others the right to practice
their religion or even lack of belief. Again, the United States was
founded on the basis of reasoned judgement NOT faith and
superstition.
This is exemplified in
the malicious rewrite of history that forgets that most, if not all
references to God in our founders documents were added later by
Christian legislators. The credo ‘In God We Trust’ was actually
added to our currency in the mid-20th century, to distinguish us from
Communist atheism.
It's
time for American patriots to start calling a spade a spade (as in
pointed shovel, not a racial slur) if you oppose the general welfare
of the American people, you stand against the Constitution. If you
oppose every American's unqualified entitlement to "Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," you stand against the
Constitution. If you favour the introduction of prayer into schools
and the Christian faith above all other religions in our laws and
institutions, then you stand against the Constitution. And if you
favour or excuse the gerrymandering of political precincts for the
sake of political advantage or to disenfranchise the right of all
U.S. citizens to vote regardless, or invite a foreign power to
interfere with a U.S. election, you stand against the Constitution.
If
you collude with a foreign power to receive stolen information
detrimental to your political opponent for political gain; not only
do you stand against the Constitution. You're a traitor to it.
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