Honesty, Mr. President, Could Earn You a Second Term

Dear President Trump,
Kudos to you for unequivocally lambasting White Supremacists in your speech to the nation a few nights ago. You sounded sincere and you are certainly supporting the ethos of our founding fathers....all men are created equal....though they didn't really mean ALL men. Those people, whom we hold in such high esteem, those people who created a nation that has become the most powerful, and in some years the most revered, in the world, those people wise as they were, could not confront and exorcise a human failing that is only one degree less evil than genocide, slavery. Yet we honor these men.

We honor our founding fathers because they accomplished an amazing task, they fought for independence from what was then the most powerful nation in the world, they won, and they crafted a nation that not only survives changes in administrations, it survived a civil war.

But we don't honor our founding fathers for their one glaring fault, for ignoring the human beings among them not included in "all men are created equal".

And there's the rub. We didn't really survive the Civil War, did we. We did not emerge whole or wiser. We didn't survive the Civil War the way Germany survived the Holocaust or South Africa survived Apartheid. Germans and white South Africans acknowledged and acknowledge their past was wrong, it was unconscionable, it was not something to be remembered in any way but with sorrow, shame, and sadness.

A great part of our nation does not remember slavery with sorrow, shame, and sadness. That is why white supremacists are emboldened.

It is time, Mr. President, to speak the truth, the truth that American leaders have never apologized to African Americans in our society, never apologized for enslaving their grandparents and great grandparents, never apologized for treating African Americans post-Civil War like second class citizens. We celebrate Martin Luther King's birthday, but we don't cringe with embarrassment when discussing our history of slavery. Why one hundred years after African Americans were "freed", there were multitudes of laws on the books denying them freedom, freedom to eat where they wished, freedom to drink from a water fountain, freedom to go to any school, live in any neighborhood, freedom to vote.

And African Americans are not the only victims in our "great" society. We don't acknowledge any degree of sorrow for robbing the Native Americans of their homelands less than 300 years ago. We don't remember by saying never-again the incarceration of our Japanese citizens during World War II or the exclusion of our Chinese citizen's families in the 1900's. And we sanitize our textbooks regarding these stains in our history. If we mention them at all, it is in passing, barely footnotes in our story.

Acknowledging our shortcomings is far more difficult than proclaiming our strengths. Humility is hard, but it can earn respect deeper than any strutting or braggadocio. Greatness resonates with people. People gravitate towards greatness, We feel it in our bones. Claiming superiority over the other guy may provoke a cheer, but it doesn't dig deep in your gut the way an inclusive message does. Caring about all of our people will resonate with each of us in a way that "us versus them" can never match.

Mr. President, we are so far from "great". We could become "great again" by acknowledging our history. Mr. President, you could turn the political climate on its head, you could stun the press, you could guarantee yourself a two-term presidency if you simply acknowledged the truth in our history.