A Nation of Immigrants

As much as Trump and his white supremacist followers would like to deny it, we are a nation of immigrants. Ever since the Pilgrims landed, we became known as such: It is deeply embedded in our DNA and remains so today. And indeed, who among us does not have an immigrant from a foreign land in our ancestry, often trying to escape persecution or just to find a better way of life elsewhere. My own maternal grandparents came from the Ukraine. My paternal grandparents came from Germany. My wife’s ancestors came from Spain. And my wife is a naturalized American citizen from Brazil.

In a Trump/Vance-run America all of those would have been turned away along with any from so-called garbage countries/U.S. territories as Trump would designate Mexico, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and virtually all of Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Asia.

But our country’s DNA (yes, countries do have a DNA of sorts) is also embedded, since 1619, with the toxin of slavery and the tenet of white supremacy to justify that enslavement of human beings for economic gain or in more gross terms, free labor. We justified the slavery of Africans and the genocide of Native Americans by labeling them lesser than European whites. They even wrote in its Constitution they were not equal to whites, nor were they deserving of the God-given rights granted to whites: what we today call White Supremacy or White Nationalism or White Christian Nationalism. All the same.

So this election is an Armageddon of sorts: a battle between good versus evil. Equal rights for all–the backbone of Democracy–versus equal rights for a select few and deportation or genocide for others–the backbone of fascism. Lincoln showed us the former: Hitler and his Nazis showed us the latter. In fact we find out now that Hitler studied American racism, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and discrimination policies in formulating his Fascist and dictatorial state. Trump keeps Hitler’s writings on his bed table and praise and coddles Putin, a white supremacist in his own right who is seeing how far his genocidal war on Ukraine can go.

Electing Kamala Harris will not end this politics of hatred and division but it will advance us on the path towards equality and justice. Electing Trump and his crowd will set us and the planet back immeasurably on that path, quite possibly to a point of no return.

The outcome of this election will depend simply on the numbers of people who vote and, of course, who they vote for. The Electoral College makes no sense in the 21st Century. But we’re stuck with it, at least for now. Only a landslide for Dems would insure that Trump would likely not mount a counteroffensive that would put the fate of the election in the hands of a Supreme Court largely appointed by him.

“These are the times that try men’s (and women’s) souls” is a line from Thomas Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis, published in 1776 during the American Revolution. The phrase was intended to motivate the colonists to persevere and fight for victory. I use it now to motivate Democrats to vote in massive numbers to defeat Donald Trump and his dangerous attack on democracy.