Great Aspirations

Elections are about much more than tax policies, health care, national budgets, who gets on the Supreme Court and fighting this pandemic, as critically important as each of those issues is. At the deepest level, elections are about our aspirations — who or what we aspire to be as a nation.

For that reason, President Trump’s campaign slogan in 2016 was brilliant.
“Make America Great Again” simultaneously tapped into many people’s sense that something was broken in the current state of affairs, resulting in fewer jobs at home and lower prestige abroad, while also articulating a desire for something more, to be “great” as a nation in the eyes of the world, or at least in the perception of those who count — the U.S. electorate.

The major problem with that slogan is the “again.” Just when was that previous great time that we so aspire to recreate? Was it our first century when we held over a million people in slavery? Was that the time of America’s greatness? Or maybe the century that followed with its Jim Crow laws and 4000 lynchings of the descendants of enslaved people? Certainly not a great time for any of them. Was it the 1960s and 1970s when we sent over 58,000 of our young citizens to their deaths in Vietnam for what great purpose? I seem to have forgotten. With Saigon about to fall we did succeed in assisting the overthrow of at least one government to further our greatness in 1973. Of course some might complain that replacing the democratically elected Allende in Chile with the military dictatorship of Pinochet was not so great for Chileans or the cause of democracy, but to be great evidently you have to be willing to sacrifice a few such things — so long as the other guy does the sacrificing.

The Reagan era of the 1980s brought great economic recovery and the collapse of the Berlin wall, that certainly was great! The Iran-Contra affair — selling weapons to Khomeini’s government in Iran in order to illegally fund the Contras fighting the government in Nicaragua — not so great. Let us also not forget the dramatic rise in incarceration rates that began in 80s, largely the result of the so-called “war on drugs,” resulting in the doubling of those in jail or prison from just over 500,000 in 1980 to over one million in 1990 and doubling again in the next decade to over two million, making the U.S. #1 in the world in both the total prison population and the highest per-capita incarceration. Is the prison-industrial complex that which we want to make great again?

The new millennium brought us 9/11 and the beginning of this country’s longest war, great for the producers of ammunitions but not much else. And given Trump’s pledge to end the “forever wars,” probably not the period he aspires to replicate. Personally, I thought the Obama administration was pretty great, but something tells me that also is a period not high on Trump’s list of greatness. Just a hunch.

Sure, we can look back on any period and find things that were great: the courage of those like Harriet Tubman leading the Underground Railroad, the “Greatest Generation” that defeated the threat of Nazi tyranny, the incredible career of Congressman John Lewis and all of the other leaders of the Civil Rights movement.

But each of those periods also has things that were not so great. How many women would like to go back to the 1950s or earlier when a “woman’s place” was largely confined to her home? For that matter, any man who prefers such is not much of a man IMHO. How many in the LGBTQ community would like to go back to that era when living in the “closet” was the only viable option if you wanted to have any life at all? The ending of such a socially barbaric practice has improved life for all of us, not just the non-heterosexuals.

So no, there is no period in our history that we should aspire to restore again. We should aspire for more than the best of our past, we should aspire to live up to the ideals of our country, that every man, woman and child, regardless of color, gender, orientation, physical attributes or ability, is created equal and entitled to certain basic rights, beginning with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as stated in our Declaration of Independence.

That is what this election is about. That is what every election should be about. Therefore, there is nothing more un-American than to attack a candidate for elected office because they were born to immigrant parents. On this point the Constitution of the U.S. could not be more clear, stating in the 14th Amendment, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” End of discussion.

While the Constitution does exclude naturalized citizens from the highest office, there is nothing that excludes children of immigrants born in this country. To the contrary, every citizen of this country other than Native Americans are descendants of immigrants. Does it make any sense to include second generation immigrants (the grandchildren of immigrants) but not the first (the children of immigrants)? The 14th Amendment makes clear that there is no such distinction.

How is this for irony? Andrew Jackson, the former President admired most by the current occupant of the White House, was born to Scotch-Irish immigrants two years after coming to North America. Any suggestion that Senator Kamala Harris, as repeated by no less than the President himself, is not qualified to serve in that office because her parents, like Jackson’s, were also immigrants, is racist, pure and simple. And anyone who does not refute such nonsense is perpetuating racism.

If anything makes this country great it is this, that a woman of color born of immigrants in this country can legitimately aspire to the highest office of the land. The choice in this election is abundantly clear. We can aspire to be a nation based on a certain ethnic identity in which those of any other identify will forever be second-class citizens at best, or we can aspire to be a nation based on an ideal that rises above all such divisions, a nation where, as Martin Luther King, Jr. so beautifully articulated on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, every person “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The content of our President’s character was succinctly summed up by Timothy Egan, writing for the New York Times, in this brief paragraph: He will even say that Joe Biden, a Roman Catholic who regularly attends church, is “against God.” The last time Trump went to church he used chemical irritants against peaceful protesters to get there, for a photo op. Commenting on Biden’s choice for his running mate, Trump again revealed his character by drawing on the racist trope of the “angry Black woman” to describe Senator Harris as “extraordinarily nasty.”

Vice President Biden, on the other hand, revealed his true character by selecting for his running mate precisely that candidate, the one who was not “nasty” but who was most critical of his record on race relations, delivering that most memorable challenge on school busing in the democratic debates. “That little girl was me,” Harris said of the second grader who was bussed to a white school in contradiction to Biden’s position at the time. Overcoming such a “punch to the gut,” as Jill Biden described it, to form a united team to lead this country says much about his character.

The content of the character of those up for election in 2020 for the highest offices of our land is pretty clear. The question now is, which best represents the character of our nation that we aspire to be? Only one choice reflects the great aspiration worthy of our ideals to which we pledge as “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” And we, who share that aspiration, must vote to make it so.

Photo: Kamala Harris with her mother, Shyamala, at a Chinese New Year parade in 2007. Kamala Harris campaign via AP.