Hope and History

I saw the entire assembly applauding, craning their necks to see him as he addressed his first joint session of congress. The hope of the world is on the slim shoulders of this young man. I write ‘the hope of the world’ because, even though our reputation is tarnished and may take several years to rebuild, the United States is still the promised land, still that which all look toward to ‘make it better’ and if we don’t succeed, hope is lost and if hope is lost, we are lost. As the planet gets smaller and I get older, I know that the view of America is mostly illusion, but a necessary one. Everyone must believe in a better way, a promise of freedom and peace or life sheds its purpose. So I will believe in this man and what he stands for, but I also know that there are forces at work that long for the old way, the war way, the capitalistic greed way. I am concerned about the increased incidence of hate crimes and how his heritage will be used against him.
Already the partisanship has surfaced-- jealous, vindictive, racist, mean. All of the things that were hidden during the election for fear that the opposition would be perceived as racist. I am old enough to understand the strong relationship between organized religion, hate and conservative politics. In fact, Christianity in particular teaches hate, judgment, and persecution. Hitler only had to intensify the historic blame on the Jews and cast them as scapegoats for everything that was going wrong in Germany during the Weimar Republic. In the past weeks I have heard people place the blame for our entire economic downfall on ‘illegal aliens’. I know that rhetoric has been seeping into our consciousness for the past few years. We are not a nation that finds it easy to blame our own selfishness, wastefulness and greed on ourselves and so we begin casting blame. We ask citizens for donations to make sure that Ellis Island is preserved as a memorial to those who came to this country from Europe, but we are building a fence on our southern border against those who don't look quite as white as they should. With the rate of unemployment climbing, already we hear that 'if we could deport all the illegals, this wouldn't happen'. So simplistic. Of course, it couldn't be us that has made our own mess--it must be the fault of others who don't speak our language, who have audacity to come to this country to make a better life for their children. A very familiar story--one that all white americans should be able to relate to, since all of us came from an immigrant(s) who crossed the Atlantic to make a better life for their children. If we make others a scapegoat for what we have done, we will always have a reason for not making it right. We will always have to find someone to blame. And we may end up proving what we who have studied the Holocaust know. Any country at any time in history given the right set of economic problems and the right ethnocentric mindset could do what Germany did. Let's not make illegal aliens our Jews.