My friends,
I've got to be frank with you. I'm confused. I'm confused why we are so closely divided about a bunch of issues. I feel like we've left common sense at the door and are just following some rabble rousers who are egging us on to follow our basest and meanest instincts.
I see folks with guns walking into malls and stores and schools, killing bunches of people, all ages, all colors, and we still think it is OK for our neighbors to own machine guns. We still think it's OK that I can buy a gun more easily than I can get a license to drive a car.
Now I'm going to say something crazy here. The second amendment is ridiculous in this day and age. You don't need a gun to protect you from the government. You don't need a gun, because it won't work. If the government wants to detain you, do you really think a gun is going to stop them. Heck, they can just sit outside your house for a few weeks and wait for you to get hungry. You can't stay inside forever.
The notion that the second amendment keeps us safe is garbage. It would be laughable if it weren't so serious. It would be laughable if it weren't so sad. We have allowed a bunch of self-centered, power hungry cowboys to convince us that it's more important to own our own pistol, with no license or regulation, than it is to keep our neighbors safe, than it is to keep our mothers and fathers, our brothers and sisters, our children safe, our two and three and four year old children safe. I'm confused. If we are seriously weighing the pros and cons of guns versus our neighbors' lives, how do we sleep at night after choosing guns? I don't get it. This should not be controversial.
I'm not suggesting you can't own a gun. I'm suggesting you can't own a machine gun, or a bazooka, or a hand grenade, or a tank. These are weapons of war and they have no place in our homes. That's my opinion. Now I know there are some folks in this country who fervently believe they should be able to own a tank or a machine gun if they want one. And I support their right to say that and believe that. I just doubt they are anywhere close to a majority. Yet we can't get a majority of your Senators to ban machine guns. Folks, our neighbors are dying because we are making it easy for deranged people to buy a machine gun and kill us with it. This is insanity. I just don't get it. Do you?
Here's something else I don't get. There are a bunch of white guys, and one of them is a very popular commentator on one of our major news channels, who claim that those of us who are white politicians are in danger of being replaced by our neighbors who are immigrants and who are not white. This is obviously an attack on people of color.
But before I get to our color differences, can I just point out that ALL of us in this nation are immigrants. Well, almost all of us. Our Native American brothers and sisters' great great great grandparents were not immigrants. They were here before the rest of us immigrants arrived, and they were largely removed from their lands by us, the conquering immigrants. And our Black brothers and sisters' great great great grandparents were not immigrants either. They were slaves, brought here in chains, against their will, and their descendants were not freed until 1863. They were technically free in 1863, but in all honesty, they couldn't even vote for another hundred years, and we have so much racism in this country that fifty-five years AFTER the 1964 Voting Rights Act was passed, half a million of us marched on June 6, 2020, DURING A PANDEMIC, in 550 different towns and cities, protesting the death of George Floyd and so many other Black Americans. The good news is that so many of us who marched were white. The bad news is that we needed to march in the first place.
But let me get back to my point, almost all of us are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. So for a commentator to proclaim with alarm that immigrants are taking over our country is non-sensical. Immigrants have been running our country since it was founded.
Now if it's certain immigrants our friend doesn't like, well that's not surprising. Why, you say? Because one of the great ironies about us Americans is that, as diverse as we are, we have always struggled to accept each other, especially our newest arrivals, especially if we arrived in large groups. One year it was the Irish, another year the Germans, another year the Chinese. The list goes on and on. We have always struggled to accept "others", shamefully sometimes for centuries, sometimes for decades, and far more often for those of us who are not white, yet our saving grace is that our nation was built upon the principle that every human being has the unalienable right to be here, regardless of her birth, regardless of her religion, regardless of her status. Thomas Jefferson penned those thoughts in 1776, and the entire world knows it.
Here is a fact. Our diversity is world renown! We are hands down the nation with the largest number of immigrants in the world, four times more than any other nation. Why is that? Given the virulent way we have treated blacks and other immigrants of color, from slavery to Chinese exclusion laws to Japanese internment camps, why do so many people still flock to our shores?
I think the most important reason people reach out to us is freedom.
We have this idea that freedom is important, even if we have had a hard time living up to it.
When Thomas Jefferson penned those words "all men are created equal", he didn't have the foresight or wisdom to include men of color, or women at all, but he did mean to challenge the notion that some people are more worthy than others just because of their birth. He was declaring that earls, dukes, kings, or queens, are no more deserving than the children of farmers or tradesmen.
And to our credit, though it has been painfully slow, we have agreed and inscribed into our constitution, with amendments, that "all men" does indeed mean "all people", all men and all women, men and women of every hue, of every skin color, of every idea, of every sexual orientation, of every religious persuasion, of every economic status, we have declared to the world that all of our citizens are equal, all are entitled to find a job, all are entitled to free education, all are entitled to vote. Just as important, all are entitled to debate this, to question it, to discuss it.
Vladimir Putin. Xi Jinping, Victor Orban, hear me. Any person in the United States can disagree with me, loudly, openly, and that person won't be arrested, won't go to jail, won't lose their job, won't lose anything. Why can't that happen in your country? What are you afraid of? Freedom?
That principle of equality for all has been the bedrock of our nation. It is who we are. And as immigrants of all stripes have reached our shores, that principle has guided us as we wrestle with very human emotions about valuing people who don't look like us, who don't think like us, who don't pray like us, who don't eat like us.
Yes, we have lost our way, many, many times. Slavery, a hundred years of lynching's, hundreds of broken treaties with our Native American citizens, internment camps for our Japanese American citizens, the list is long and shameful and painful. And our pain in reciting it is nothing compared to the pain our neighbors experienced while enduring it.
It's ironic that the very core of our nation, the very principle that each of us is equal to and is as good as another....this principle feeds our diversity, even in the face of years of discrimination. The irony is that our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution promise freedom, promoting diversity....I mean, seriously, who is not attracted to freedom....and for many of us, particularly those of us who are white, that diversity is troubling....which is not surprising.
Humans the world over are not used to people who are different, especially if we live in more homogeneous communities. We're suspicious. We worry. We find ourselves treating these different strangers with less compassion than we treat strangers who look and think like us.
But for those of us who happen to get to know these different strangers due to whatever happenstance, we find they aren't so different. They have worries and joys just as we do. They have jobs to get to, children to raise, parents to care for, friends to commune with. They have talents, they have difficulties, they have strengths, they have weaknesses, they have viewpoints, they have backgrounds that often turn out to be similar to ours or our parents' or grandparents', or that may be very different yet worth learning about.
The human experience is so rich. We are both so alike yet so magnificently different. To digress, just for a minute, I have always been confused and surprised when folks, usually devoutly religious folks, proclaim that gay people are bad or wrong. Gay people need to be cured. God couldn't possibly have made people gay on purpose. Really? God doesn't have the imagination or capacity to create gay people? God can create amoebas and dinosaurs, oxygen and hydrogen, 17,500 species of butterflies, but not gay people. I think some of us are underestimating God.
We all eat, breathe, and love. We may eat different food, and love with different customs. But just as we tell our children as they find themselves with a new baby brother or sister that there is plenty of love to go round, so we will find that we too can appreciate new and different customs, foods, thoughts, clothes, smiles and faces. And that is a strength.
The diversity we have and, scream though we may, our willingness to embrace it, enriches our nation and serves as a beacon for others.
Our diversity can help us understand other nation's problems. Our diversity can give other nations confidence that we have the capacity to understand where they are coming from and help them.
Our diversity can give us the capacity to understand each other in our own country, to help each other, to support each other, as we go to work, raise our families, and participate in our communities. I encourage you to treasure our diversity, to reach out to your neighbors, to get to know each other. We are our strength, we are what makes our nation great, we are greater because of our different backgrounds and circumstances.
Stay well and God Bless.
