Among the greatest lies of this rancid era is the one that posits we, as Americans, have nothing in common.
American citizenship binds us all together. We share citizenship in the greatest Republic that has ever existed. We share the challenges of an era that is turbulent and volatile. We share the burdens caused by rapid transformation and disruption. We share a history that is simultaneously glorious and tragic. We share a moment in time and a land of unparalleled beauty and magnificence. We share America.
There must be no citizen above another. American citizenship comes in one of two completely equal ways: through the luck of birthright or the fortune to choose it. It is the choice more than the birth that refreshes the lifeblood of the nation. It reaffirms, in an instant, the majesty of the United States, as a place unique among all of the nations of the world.
The United States is founded on the power of an idea. The idea is as simple as it is profound and revolutionary. When it was first asserted, it was written with a quilled pen in a slaveholder’s hand. It shook the world, and began a transformative era of human history that ultimately lifted billions of human beings into the light of freedom and prosperity all over the world.
The idea was so powerful that it could not be contained for the people for whom it was written. The idea spread. It burned into the hearts of people all over the world that “All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
The United States is the only nation in the world made up of all of the world’s people, where nearly every known language is spoken, somewhere every single day. The genius of humanity found a home in a new nation that was deeply imperfect, but closer than anything that had come before. More importantly, the design of the Constitution, which has endured into a fourth century, allows for the continual expansion of freedom by each generation of Americans. Each has been gifted with the chance to write hopeful new chapters, as opposed to being enslaved under the chains of old dogmas of oppression. That is the gift of freedom and democracy. It means the people are above the State, and that the people are tomorrow’s authors, not its pawns. Simply put, it means that anything is possible.
The instinct for one group of humans to assert control over another group is primal. It is biblical. This is the basis for most of human history. It is a savage, brutal story in which strength and power have license to take, destroy and kill at whim. It was the law of the jungle, and the law of the jungle has no mercy. The birth of the United States was a hinge of history and a challenge to the premise that might makes right. It established a nation without a king, emperor, or dictator.
The American people declared that they were sovereign. They built a new nation on the foundation of the rule of law, one in which new institutions were invented to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The United States became a land where the supremacy of an individual and his right to rule was rejected. It was rejected in favor of co-equal institutions that were created to guarantee the endurance of providentially granted rights that establish in this current moment a citizenship of equality for all people under the law.
Fundamentally, this is what is at stake in this moment of contestation around our founding idea. American freedom is anchored by two ideas around which the experiment in self-government rests. The first is the sanctity of the outcome of elections. This is the continuation of the Mayflower Compact that first asserted the commitment to majority rule for the public good on North American soil. The second is the peaceful transition of power.
King George III was always curious about the man who had bested him and halved his Empire. He wanted to know if George Washington would be an emperor or king. He was in disbelief at the idea that Washington would retire to Mt. Vernon and voluntarily cede power. He commented that should Washington do so, he would be the greatest man of his age. He was.
Donald Trump is the worst man of this age for his refusal to yield power. It establishes him as the worst President in American history, as well as the most disloyal, treacherous and dangerous. He is without peer. He is the antithesis of George Washington, and he has personally poisoned faith and belief in the virtues of American liberty more than any American who has ever breathed air. He did that because he is selfish, petulant, narcissistic, and delusional. He wanted to cling to power, and he would burn down the United States to get it. He is a small and disgraced man who remains a danger because he did not do anything alone. Trump remains the glowing core of a malice reactor that powers a billion-dollar division industry.
Donald Trump is small.
America is big and grand – both in form and design.
The country is so much bigger than the rancid Trump family and the despicable cast of cowards, enablers, quislings, appeasers, cynics and opportunists who all glommed on to the most unworthy cause since secession, with the exception of the defence of Jim Crow.
Perspective matters.
The United States spans a continent, and is filled with a mosaic of humanity that is bound together by the revolutionary idea that “We the People” can maintain a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That is a big idea, and we were temporarily beset by a very small man who wanted power at any cost. He must never get it again.
There is only one place where Donald Trump ever looks big. It is on a screen. The smaller the screen, the bigger he looks. All of the screens seem connected together. It seems the people who decide what we see on those screens believe we wish to see disharmony and malice. If they believe there is an audience for something better, they remain captive to the sure thing that is in front of them. The Trump Industrial Complex will keep on giving so long as everyone keeps looking down.
Looking down. Staring at a screen. America wasn’t built in a day, as they say, and it absolutely wasn’t built looking down.
The Pursuit of Happiness isn’t best pursued looking down at a screen.
Staring at a screen makes the world small. It makes small people look big.
Staring at a screen is like staring at a prison cell wall because the people behind what you see have placed barriers around information. Each moment is a journey further down the rapids where the algorithms narrow the horizon to a small, dark and angry sky. Don’t be fooled.
Looking up helps us see what connects us. What binds us is America. It is an astonishing place. Disconnected from the mainland is the place that calls itself the Last Frontier: Alaska. It is.
I’ve spent the past week here, and I am awestruck by its magnificence. Alaska focuses the mind and strains the senses. It is a place where the quiet can be heard and an intuition overwhelms the senses that nothing being seen could ever be rendered on a screen.
There is no accident that the people who imposed the algorithms on society – who want to keep people looking down at the screens – are the same ones airing commercials celebrating the coming day where we all put masks over our eyes and completely check out of reality. No thanks.
America is a country filled with people who are looking up and out, being led by small people looking down.
It’s time to start looking up and out again, including in our politics. Alaska is the type of place that helps a person sort that out. Without question, it is a place every American should visit at least once.
America. The idea exists across a vast landscape and tethers 329 million human beings to it. It exists beyond the experiences of a single lifetime. The future of humanity’s progress, liberty and freedom is deeply linked to its endurance. It is a trust and an inheritance that is passed down from one generation to the next in a great unfolding drama built on the most amazing of concepts: the pursuit of happiness.
The journey across Prince William Sound from Whittier to BlackStone Glacier was clouded in mist and driving rain. The Chugach Mountains and National Forest rose into the sky, a kaleidoscope of every shade of green. Eagles circled overhead, and the waves were three feet high. It was a long way from Washington, DC, and Mar-a-Lago. It was a long way from all the strife. All I could think was this, too, is America and I am very grateful to be an American.
Your words, purposeful. Your thoughts, meaningful. I so appreciate it.
As I look out on my backyard in the Mountains of West Virginia, I understand the love for America.
A transplant, born in Maine. The daughter of a Retired Lieutenant Commander in the Navy, and a Physical Education Teacher from Massachusetts , always had the Country at the core of our Hearts.
Respect. Honor. Ethics.
Our Country, sweet land of Liberty.
Most of my Statesmen here are lost. Woven by greed, power and religion gone wrong.
The power of the Kennedy blue, gone to blood red sorrow.
These people are kind. I know them. These people love their Country, I know it. These people love their families and college football games, they do. But they are lost.
America. The screens that we look down to. America, West Virginia, where Fox News plays 24/07.
I am not lost.,We are still here. Waiting. Tired of the Old White Men, seeking nothing but Power.
Sick, psychotic liars.
I see America here. The beauty, the wildlife, the roaring rivers and love of nature.
We need to shut down and return to Peace.
If you get the time, would you please give us your opinion on Jonathan Swan‘s new article for Axios, “A Radical Plan for Trump’s second term“?. Trump’s eventual understanding that his only means to perpetual fascistic rule of our country was by the gutting of the government and replacing it with his ignorant sycophants was and is the most frightening part of this world-shaking atrocity.