What is America to Me?
"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!" – Emma Lazarus
When we turn away refugees escaping persecution, we cease
being the United States of America. When we institute a religious test for
those who are allowed into our country, we cease being the United States of
America. When those in power, or seeking such, suggest warrantless searches,
identification badges and unlawful surveillance of U.S. citizens who follow a
specific faith - procedures and practices much more characteristic of the Third
Reich than our “shining city upon a hill,” we cease being the United States of
America. When we follow Republican ideology of fear and loathing toward those
of different backgrounds and different beliefs, we surrender our freedoms, our
values and our traditions, and we cease being the United States of America.
I'm not giving in an inch
to fear
'Cause I've promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it to someone - David Crosby
'Cause I've promised myself this year
I feel like I owe it to someone - David Crosby
I will not let my
life, my actions and my principles be determined, or in any way altered or influenced, by the intolerance, purposeful ignorance
and flourishing hatred that spews continuously and contemptuously from the
voices and malicious minds of the GOP, the Conservative base and the Tea Party,
breeding ground of domestic terrorism. I
will not live in fear.
I am an American, a proud American, the grandchild
of immigrants – those very immigrants who populated, built and enriched
America, and the very immigrants whom the Right would now seek to prohibit from
alighting upon our once beckoning, welcoming and teeming shores. I am a patriotic American, a compassionate,
tolerant, humane, empathic American, a Constitutional American; therefore,
by very definition, never a Republican; the newly malevolent, self-serving political
party, with an ideology awash in ill-intentions, that has devolved into, and heartily embraced, the cliché of “the enemy
within.”
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| These are the innocent children who strike dread in Republican souls across our 50 states |
For our health as a nation and a people, for a strong and
meaningful and purposeful existence, and perhaps even for our very survival and
future, can we hold in our hearts more the sentiments of Emma Lazarus rather
than the vile views, odious opinions and dangerous demagoguery of the Trumps,
Fiorinas or Cruz’s; those who care not for the well-being of this great land or
its residents, and who have proven more than willing to damage and destroy in
search of personal gain and glory?
Can we try not to fear and hate these innocent and
endangered Syrian children seeking desperate refuge from violence and
terrorism, so vindictively vilified by the Right Wing, for whatever reasons
small-minded people do so, and instead, display some compassion, some humanity,
some basic decency and dare I say, for those who believe so but act otherwise,
some Christian charity?
That’s what an American is. That’s how an American behaves.
That’s what America means. And sadly, somewhere along the way, the Republican
establishment has ceased believing in the United States of America.
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| More of the evil ISIS terrorists with whom Obama plans to plague our country |
“The house I live
in
A plot of earth,
the street
The grocer and the
butcher
Or the people that
I meet,
The children in
the playground
The faces that I
see,
All races and
religions
That’s America to
me.” – Abel Meeropol
Any comments, questions, criticisms, candid confessions,
cash contributions? Contact me at
butchersaprons@mail.com.
