... and several butcher's aprons.: The Meaning of “American” – Don’t Let the Republicans Ruin the Dream

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

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.”

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.