What is a Good American?

I was forced to think about this when a friend reacted to several of my posts on Facebook. Generally, the posts opposed the recent Trump nominations for Cabinet level appointments. It bothered me that several people appointed were essentially opposed to the mission of the departments they were supposed to lead. Rick Perry, asked to be Secretary of Energy, had made statements in the past that he wanted to abolish the Department of Energy; Betsy DeVos, the Trump nomination for the head of the Department of Education and billionaire heiress that includes a share of the Amway fortune, has spent years of her life and millions of her dollars harming public education and promoting public money for Christian schools. And so on.

So, first, let me show you what I posted and then what my friend wrote as a comment. The first post referenced a critique of DeVos in Esquire magazine: 

Another post, criticized Rick Perry as unqualified to run the Department of Energy:  

And this is my evangelical church friend’s reaction:

Richard, looks like you’d like to start another Civil War. Give it up and support our new President. Give him a chance man. Love you.

In other words, in her mind, I was doing something wrong. What I was doing was scary and/or treasonous (starting “another Civil War”), and I should stop posting such things (“give it up”) and be quiet (“give him a chance”).

She wasn’t alone. Admonitions by some Trump voters to “shut up, grow up, and accept the election results” were rampant throughout Facebook land and other social media. Some even said, “if you don’t like the results, move to Cuba or Afghanistan.” 

Wow! It reminded me of fans of the Vietnam War back in 1968 or 1970 who supported Johnson or Nixon and the “containment” and interventionist foreign policy. “America: Love it or Leave it!” they said or yelled or wrote – over and over. The not-so-hidden message was always: “Because I support the war I’m a good American, but because you do not support the war, you are not a good American.”

Let’s face it: what the expression means is, “agree with my values or leave the country.” Or, “if you don’t agree with me, you are a traitor.”

I don’t remember many (if any) progressives telling the tea party agitators to love America [love progressive values] or leave America, although I imagine many of us felt that tea party rank and file did not represent our idea of America.

What are the values of a good American?

The values that Americans hold dear vary greatly. That’s another way of saying, we disagree with each other. The level of disagreement can reach the level of one friend telling another that his beliefs and values are “evil.” (It has happened to me.) There are many factors that help create these different opinions about “a good American.” Here are two of these factors:

1.  Changes in values over the course of American history.

For example, the original Constitution allowed for slavery. At the time of the writing in 1789, many thought it was evil, but even after over 700,000 died from the Civil War and the Constitution was amended to abolish slavery, many Americans continued to believe in the legitimacy of slavery until past the turn of the century. And the belief in the inferiority of black people (a key underpinning belief to slavery) was institutionalized everywhere through segregation and “Jim Crow” laws and “racial superiority” was still widely written about and spoken about through the 1960s.

Such (racist) ideas about race are still believed today to one degree or another although they are usually discussed in code. An example of this can be advocating for school choice (ostensibly so parents can obtain access to better quality schools, but mainly to avoid schools with black student populations). Or when a school committee approves a budget that disproportionately leaves poor schools with inadequate facilities compared to other schools in the district or state.

Depending which year of American history and which location in America, an argument can be made that slavery, segregation, discrimination, and profiling are all American values. At the same time, today at least, many Americans –with the full support of the Constitution and American law– would say all of those things are distinctly unAmerican!

2.  Making one’s religious values partially the same as one’s American values.

This is what happened in 17th century Massachusetts. Among other things, you had to be a member of the church to vote. There was only one church: the Puritan church. The town meeting voted on both civic and church matters. And church members were a rather small minority. Church leaders were proud of this and boasted with a phrase we often hear from conservatives today: we are a “shining city on a hill” (an example to all other countries). Early Massachusetts was a theocracy – neither a republic or a democracy. They could perhaps claim that God was at the center of their government, but a lot changed from the early colonial days to the days that the Constitution with its Bill of Rights was finalized in 1791. Indeed, 120 years had passed.

By the time of the Constitution, most Americans were against state-approved churches and had come to favor the separation or tolerance ideas practiced in colonies like Rhode Island, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. But again, practices regarding religious freedom also evolved over history.

Today, some Americans still consider Catholics, Mormons, Atheists and pretty much any other religion but their own to be suspicious and that the Bible should be the final guide to all legislation. On the other hand, most Americans –with the full support of the Constitution and American law– would say that religious discrimination and making laws that favor only one religion are distinctly unAmerican!

What can ‘good Americans’ agree on?

So there are quite a variety of values that Americans hold, and some of these values contradict other values, as mentioned in just two examples above.

But certainly (hopefully) we can agree that a good American is one who respects and supports the specific citizen rights as stated in the Constitution, as interpreted in American law and supported by interpretation of the Supreme Court [that’s how it should work according to the Constitution]. A few of many examples:

• All citizens have the right to vote.
• All citizens have the right to peaceably assemble (demonstrate, protest, sing, pray, or teach) and say or shout what they want.
• All citizens have the right to write letters of protest to any part of the government, create and sign petitions to any part of the government concerning any issue.
• All citizens have the right to publish whatever they want in the “press” short of copyright infringement or libel.

I think expressing opinions about laws, planned laws, government department heads, newly nominated government department heads, Supreme Court decisions, and certainly any Presidential word or action can hardly be unAmerican. None of those rights can or should be restricted.

In fact, it could be argued that the preservation of our democratic republic relies upon citizens to do these things. It relies upon an actively engaged citizenry. To put it differently, citizens have a duty to be vigilant and exercise these particular rights.

“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” – Elie Wiesel

“It’s the action, not the fruit of the action, that’s important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there’ll be any fruit. But that doesn’t mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

“Dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence.” ― Ovid

“If I were to remain silent, I’d be guilty of complicity.” ― Albert Einstein

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ― Frederick Douglass

So, back to my church friend who wrote to me saying:

Richard, looks like you’d like to start another Civil War. Give it up and support our new President. Give him a chance man. Love you.

My written response was this:

“Give him a chance” – What does that really mean? I should support these kinds of appointments? I am hoping (although given the odds with a Republican majority, it is not likely) that wisdom will prevail. I view some of these appointments as morally wrong.

“Start another Civil War” – that’s ridiculous. But if I can persuade my representatives or any other lawmakers to consider my views, then I am engaging — not just in the right of speech and assembly, but in my citizenship duty. The threat of oligarchy that can increasingly hurt millions of our own people, but also to our national security, is not something to be ignored with platitudes like “give him a chance.”

I will NOT blindly support ANY President or other politician, nor should any other American. I will evaluate each action of the President on its own merits, and support or oppose it in accordance with the likelihood that it contributes to peace, freedom, and justice.

Anything I see as a threat, I will share with other Americans and where enough of us can agree, we can collectively hold the President and Congress accountable. THAT is democracy. If we all surrender to “shut-up and support” because “that is what good patriotic Americans do,” or that is what the majority want us to do, then we can kiss our freedom away and welcome totalitarianism right now and just get it over with.

It is strange to even have to say these things. Maybe there was a failing in their civics education. But my friend’s comments to me are representative of thousands of Trump voter comments in response to the Women’s March on January 21, 2017. A few examples [copied exactly as written]:

• He’s #yourpresidentnow so quit whining, get with the program and join the rest of America that wants to make America great again, or, you can always be left at the baby/toddler center at IKEA.
• “I don’t know what to do to make a difference anymore, and this feels like a first step,” she said. (1) Grow up. (2) Get an education and forget the indoctrination. (3)
• Don’t be a useful idiot. Who cares, go home and get back in the kitchen.
• You lost, we won. Get over it and mostly, get over yourselves.
• Attention American Men! Boycott american women they are a big part of the problem and are narcistically against our new president Trump. Let’s shut them up once and for all. Unless your one of the beaten down cowardly weak men who have raised the millenial disasters walking around today.

Good Americans resist government policies and programs that hurt other Americans

For years, the dominance of the insurance industry lobby has hurt Americans’ health by refusing to insure people with pre-existing conditions and putting life-time caps on coverage, among many of there nefarious profit-based thinking. By “going along” with for-profit health insurance programs, our government is hurting other Americans.

All attempts to introduce changes have been vehemently opposed by the Republicans for many years, although they did not and do not have a plan of their own. Finally, when President Obama had the opportunity of a Democrat controlled Congress the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was passed. Since many Democrats have also been paid off by the insurance lobby, the ACA was not the ideal solution; it was a solution based on significant compromise. There were mixed results. Millions of Americans who had no health insurance were finally covered; others found that the rates were too high or that there choices were greatly limited.

With the election of Trump and a Republican controlled Congress, the political power to get rid of the ACA has arrived, and Republicans can hardly wait to restore ideological purity by groveling to the insurance industry… and repealing the ACA (with no replacement in sight). Among the Republican ideas most often mentioned is to encourage Americans to have Health Savings Accounts (HSA). No matter how they are constructed, no one (other than perhaps the top 10%) can save enough money to cover a few $50,000 hospitalizations, randomly assigned by God or fate. Maybe they just need to think outside the box on this.

For this reason, I joined in a rally/protest in Boston on January 15.

On Inauguration Day, Bernie Sanders said, and I agree totally:

Today is going to be a tough day for millions of Americans including myself. Our response has got to be not to throw up our hands in despair, not to give up, but in fact to fight back as effectively and as vigorously as we can. Our job is to keep our eyes on the prize, and the prize is that we will continue fighting for a government that represents all of us and not just the 1%. We’re going to go forward in the fight for economic, social, environmental and racial justice. That’s who we are. That’s what we’re going to do. We are not giving up.

Donald Trump won the presidency in accordance with laws and the Constitution. Yes, the Democratic Party screwed up. Yes there were irregularities in the process by the FBI Director and Russia. But that is all past, and Trump is the President.

However, he is erratic and somewhat unhinged (as in speaking at the CIA headquarters on Sunday January 22). He is a liar who wants to curtail the truth by censoring federal employees and bullying the press corps. And his reckless changes in policies to benefit the 1% – the national oligarchic elites – is completely opposed to what he told people. And this is all in the first few days.

No, I’m not likely to get over it. Just like the persistence of those that relentlessly attacked and demonstrated against President Obama during his eight years in office (which was their right), I plan to do the same for Trump on the issues that are important for me. Fortunately, I won’t be alone.