WHAT KIND OF AMERICA?

    

     I loathe the nostalgic appeals to a mythic America that only served the interests of elites whether democrat or republican. I repulse the perspective that says anything to get elected, erasing history in route while forging a route toward an ideal that will repeal democratic safeguards and human rights. I marvel at the people who fear the evil of President Obama (or Governor Mitt Romney) because they believe that we need to “take our country back.” From whom and to where, that’s what I wonder when I hear voices thunder from political platforms around the nation. President Obama was elected through democratic standards and republican process. The same can’t be said about the previous administration’s last term. Even so, what kind of America indicts all republicans as morally depraved because of the wave of insidious slander coming from a few loose cannons? What kind of America are we creating because of our political leanings?

     That's what I ask with each insult that insists only one party cares for and is capable of leading America. That's why I find it troubling when citizens aren’t bubbling over the insolence that has defiled President Obama’s reign and previous campaign, whether through outbursts by an angry Congressman or via a retort by a party cohort --Bill Clinton’s comment. In referencing President Obama, President Clinton blurted, “Just think, a hundred years ago he would have been getting us coffee.” Where is the outrage about these remarks and similar reminders, which suggests some people think that America only belongs to one kind or class of people? Where is the outrage over Michelle Obama recently being depicted as a slave on the cover of a French magazine? I’ve experienced more disgust over a bad call at a sporting event than I have over these neo-American politics, the sentiments of which we inevitably export.

     What kind of America (and American) gives a consensual silence to the growing practice of linguistic violence, which no other Administration has faced, because of its fears and misguided loyalty to a party? Why have alternative parties when we have the same kind of willfully blind people perched therein? We need new people more than we do new parties as far as I’m concerned. But it all depends upon what we have learned from history, whether contemporary or ancient. That’s why I strive to tread lightly because I want to pledge rightly my allegiance. Maybe that’s also why I’m neither democrat nor republican, libertarian or independent.  I reject any wholesale allegiance that requires me to abandon my duty to reason. Else my support merely supplants those principles we claim to hallow. What kind of America would this yield –one that is admittedly shallow.