Being a native American born in our nation’s largest city of immigrant parents, I always thought I had a clear idea of who we Americans are and therefore, what we wanted.
I knew that ours was an international country with many of the best qualities of other homelands. Our people had a bit of the charm of the Irish, the warmth of the Italians, the hard work ethic of the Germans, the integrity of the Hungarians (I added this because my mother was Hungarian) and the childlike simplicity of a humble Latin American. We were free and loved our freedom. We were generous and shared our prosperity with the less fortunate. We gave everyone a chance to be the best that they can be just like the slogan of our all-volunteer army.
In America a foreigner could enter our land legally, learn our language and culture, become a citizen after renouncing all others (kind of like a wedding vow) and be considered an American as would his or her children, born in this country as I was.
When our President campaigned for office, he told us that there is one America, not two or three, but just one. There was no Blue America or Red America. There was no Italian-American or Hungarian-American or Black-American. We are all Americans. This idea, like so many in life, is both true and false.
Compared to people of other lands, we are all the same. We’re like the Bette Midler song “From A Distance.” From a distance we are all Americans, but the closer you get, the more different we seem.
We saw it in the past election. A black candidate got more than 90% of the black vote but lost the white vote to his absurdly inferior rival in every age category except for that of our youngest voters. If an American of Asian, Hispanic or Jewish heritage runs for office, he or she can be sure to get the vast majority of his or her group’s members’ votes. So much for our non-hyphenated equality.
We have somehow forgotten the notion that an American must renounce all other citizenships. Some of us are trying to see how many passports we can qualify for. Did your great grandmother come from Germany? You can be a German. And if your grandmother was from France, you can also become French. Wasn’t there a great-grand parent from Ireland? Let’s add that to your nationality shopping cart.
So as our country of melting pot fame becomes one that strives for salad bowls with each difference among us taken to its greatest extremes, we seem to lose our cohesiveness, our national identity.
But in addition to these cultural divides, I think there is a deeper one, one becoming harder to bridge. The polarization of our political parties has created extremists on both sides - the Left and the Right.
The Left is for the underdog. Our underdogs include the poor, most minority members, union workers, government employees, the disabled and best of all, illegal immigrants (referred here as document-free residents). The document-free residents have everything a Left-leaner is looking for. They are usually less educated, unskilled, poor, living in the shadows and unable to fend for themselves.
Many in the Left have lost their faith and declare themselves to be atheists (or just claim to not believe in any of the controversial parts of their religion) primarily because the idea of absolute truth flies in the face of their quest to reduce causes of low self esteem that violators of objective laws (read “sinners”) might feel. They do not believe in Adam and Eve as described in Genesis, but rather in Nature and its laws of natural selection via the survival of the fittest. But they don’t want even these laws applied to our least fit - our underdogs - their raison d’etre. They believe that a force greater than the individual, like the State (or G-d if He exists) should step in and help the helpless. Food stamps should provide food for the hungry, welfare programs should provide for the living needs of the poor and disabled and the government should ensure that all Americans have health care coverage. The underdogs cannot be allowed to fail no matter what Nature demands.
Many in the Right are devoutly religious. The vast majority claim Christianity as their proud national religion whose main teaching is that the way we treat the most needy is the way we treat our Savior. Jesus, Himself, helped the lepers, the poor and the disenfranchised. He demonstrated the ultimate example of noblesse oblige.
But the Right also believe in maintaining the supremacy of the top dog. Their top dogs are the rich and powerful. To the Right, the top dog is everything that America stands for. The top dog works hard to win in whatever he attempts and is not inhibited by objective moral laws or agreed upon rules of conduct to successfully compete. The Ten Commandments, whatever they actually say, are really important until and unless they stand in the way of coming out on top. Ideas like thou shall not steal, lie (yes, the one about false witness is not only about court appearances), covet and most of all to have no gods before the One are no impediment to these folks.
And though the members of the Right are religious, they believe that Man’s future is most secure when natural selection (also known as the free market) is allowed to operate freely. That means that only the most fit survive. There should be no intervention by a force greater than the individual like the State (or even the Creator who they say does exist). Do not extend unemployment benefits, do not bail out failed banks and auto companies and do not prevent foreclosures and bankruptcies, they say. And, they add, do not give health care to those who can not get it at work or pay for it themselves. They want tax cuts for the very richest among us, but don’t want to subsidize health care coverage for 30 million Americans without it. They want government to stop regulating the private sector, trusting in their basic integrity and the infallibility of the free market.
The Right also wants us to trust the intuitive wisdom of human nature. Parents, no matter how uneducated, know what’s best for their kids to eat, no matter how obese. We should also trust the intrinsic goodness of business leaders, the Right insists. They don’t need a bunch of government regulations to make sure that their product and service are of the highest standard. Business is self regulating, they want us to believe, with thousands of class-action suits, the B.P. oil spill, the discrimination against its female employees by the country’s largest retail corporation, the manipulation of the energy market in California by large energy companies, the fraud and moral bankruptcy of Enron, Providian, MCI, Countrywide, Arthur Anderson, Lehman Brothers, Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs et al notwithstanding. These many examples of systemic failure have failed to dampen their world view.
And while members of the Left, no matter how successful in their own pursuits, still identify with those least able to excel, the members of the Right, no matter how unsuccessful and unlikely to ever be otherwise, identify with the top dogs. They want the rich to get tax breaks because they think that someday they too may join their privileged ranks, disregarding all signs to the contrary. These misguided believers will defend the very people who are exploiting them against the laws and government trying to protect them.
So what is the answer? How do we unite a badly divided nation?
Plato and Aristotle had the answer. I think that they called it the Golden Mean. Buddha had the Middle Path. President Obama has finding common ground. I call it moderation.
We must stop looking for our top dogs or underdogs so that we can see all of our people and attend to their common needs and goals. The rich are much too rich, even for their own good and the poor are too poor even for all their shortcomings. We must have a tax code that is both simple and fair. Our government must free itself of waste, corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness. Holes in our safety nets like Social Security and Medicare must be mended. We must stop subsidizing industries that are doing well on their own like agriculture and oil. American businesses, while continuing to work to increase profit, must also strive to make this a better country by treating their American workers and customers fairly. And, it would really help if we stayed out of the affairs of other countries by neither attacking them nor bribing them with foreign aid and military bases to protect them.
And let’s go back to being 100 percent Americans and not also citizens of other lands. We marry only one person at a time, why not be a citizen of one country at a time?
Then, perhaps we will truly be, up close as well as at a distance, one nation with a united, non-hyphenated people who know who we are and what we really want.
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