I was wrong. I thought we were in agreement on the Big
Things, and the fights and debates were about details, the how-do-you-get-there
stuff. I thought we were on the same page about what America IS and what America
is FOR. I was wrong.
I was wrong—and I think that’s why this election has been so
difficult for me, and for so many other people. It revealed something I hadn’t
seen before. Maybe I was too dumb to see it, or too sheltered and bubbled. I
don’t know. But I’m seeing it now.
I thought America was for anyone who believed in and adopted
the core beliefs of the country, as put down by the authors of the Declaration
of Independence and the Constitution—with, perhaps, some Thoreau, Whitman,
Emerson, and Lincoln thrown in for good measure. I was raised to believe that
those core beliefs were what made us American.
It’s not surprising that I was raised to believe this. My
great-grandparents were immigrants, and were so committed to the project of
becoming Americans that, within two generations, any stories or memories they
had of the “old world” were forever lost to the family.
I was raised to believe that our core beliefs—and nothing
else—were what made us Americans—that being American was (unlike being Greek, or
French, or Irish, or Chinese) not about having a unique ethnicity or culture or
rituals, not about having a deep history of peoplehood tied to a unique and particular
place—that being American was an identity that was open to anyone.
Of course, there were caveats and hold-on-a-minutes laced all
throughout that set of childhood beliefs, things I had to encounter and deal
with as I got older—like the fact that there was a group who had a “deep
history of peoplehood,” here, who our forefathers slaughtered. But even as a
cynical teenager, I felt strongly that the failings were things we could fix—things
we would fix—things that our core
beliefs would simply not allow to continue existing. So, fine: Jefferson may
not have thought of black men when he said “all men are created equal.” But having
said it, it could never be unsaid,
and it would eventually force us to do the right thing. The more we read and
spoke and believed the words, the more they would transform us into the New
People and the New Nation we wanted to be. The belief in those words made us
who we were. They were our catechism; our dogma; our civic religion.
But I was wrong. Or—I wasn’t wrong in believing those
things; I was wrong in thinking we all
believed those things. I thought even the worst of us believed those things,
but also—at the same time—held racist or sexist or xenophobic attitudes that contradicted
those beliefs, creating an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. There are probably
people about whom that is true. But there are also people who just flat-out disagree
with everything I’ve written. They believe that America is for the Caucasian
Europeans who first claimed and stole this land from its native population—that
the history of the country should place those people front and center (not just
in the early chapters, but in every chapter), and that the culture of the
country should be deeply centered in and defined by the cultures of the English
and northern European peoples who filled Independence Hall, 200+ years ago. Now
and forever.
Columnist Pat Buchanan makes his America First (and White
America even more-first) feelings very clear.
America was, is, and must remain a “Western, Christian country.” People who are
neither Western nor Christian can live in the country, of course, and be
citizens here, but they can’t really own
it like he can. For Buchanan, the American identity has nothing to do with our
founding documents or our laws. There’s an American identity that existed
before those documents were ever written, and has a deeper, more profound
importance. Of course, as someone of Irish descent, Pat’s acceptance as a “Western
Christian” would not have been a given, a hundred years ago. But whatever. He’s
in, and the Mexicans are out. He’s in, and the Arabs are out. That’s the way it
should be. Or—he warns us—we can let in all of those non-western and/or
non-Christian folks and utterly lose our country.
We can lose the country, no matter what
those people believe, or desire, or commit their lives to, because they are
the wrong kinds of people.
Ann Coulter, predictably, makes Pat Buchanan sound like
Gandhi, talking
about “Emma Lazarus' insane idea that all countries of the world should send
their losers to us.” Of course she’s a loon, and a professional
bomb-thrower, and all that. But when you hear her words and ideas being echoed
by the new administration, you have to start paying attention. When your new
president decides that only brown-skinned Muslims need watching as “terrorists”—that
the government
no longer has to spend money to keep an eye on white extremists—well, then you
have to deal with the fact that you’re not using the same dictionary as other
people.
What I do know is this: I’m not an American because it
pleases my neighbors’ sense of Christian charity and makes them feel
big-hearted and tolerant. No thank you. My ancestors had to live at the
pleasure of kings in one nation after another—never citizens, never under the
protection of the law, always disposable when their presence became a problem. Their
gravestones are in Yiddish, no matter what country they lived in, because they
were kept so isolated—and were driven out so regularly—that it was never an
advantage to learn the native language. They were forced to be a nation apart,
with no home in the world—and were then held under eternal suspicion because
they didn’t truly belong, anywhere they lived. That is not going to happen
again.
So Pat, Ann, Donald: this isn’t your country, just because
you love Jesus. This isn’t your country, just because you don’t tan well. This
isn’t your country, just because your relatives got here before mine. This is your country, God help us, but it’s
also mine.
It’s mine, not just because I was born here, but because I
signed on the dotted line and said YES to the things that our best dreamers wrote
and dreamed and believed: YES to, “All men are created equal;” YES to, “Consent
of the governed;” YES to the first amendment (and the second, and the third…);
YES to, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” And, while
we’re at it: YES to, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist;” YES to, “I
went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately;” YES to those “huddled
masses, yearning to breathe free;” YES to, “I got to light out for the
Territory ahead of the rest;” YES to, “I celebrate myself and sing
myself;” and YES to leaning forward to the, “next crazy venture beneath the
skies.”
Those are my articles of faith. Those are my non-negotiables.
What are yours?
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