MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

“We will make America strong again. I promise. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And we will make America great again!”

I wonder who said that? It is easy to fantasize about the past and romanticize memories to the point where they’re no longer accurate. Maybe we remember a barbecue, surrounded by friends and family. Maybe we remember sitting at the bar with friends old and new, laughing throughout the night. We look back on the times and think THAT was when America was great. However, these are personal reflections, not a reflection on the quality of the whole nation.

I have a question: When was America ever great?

Was it when America was born? When we built our country off the backs of indentured servants and slaves? Where the people were stripped of their rights and worked for no pay or compensation?

Was it when we slaughtered the American Indians? When we made our imperialist push West, murdering and displacing any who opposed us?

Was it the industrial revolution? When the laborers toiled at the factories from sunrise to sundown? When children were maimed and killed, and women burned to death in factory fires? Where the poor couldn’t afford their homes and were evicted because they could barely afford food?

Was it the 50’s? When a black and white man could not use the same bathrooms, eat at the same restaurants, or drink the same water? Maybe it was when segregation was overturned in Plessy v. Ferguson. De jure segregation was made illegal, but discrimination remained and violence spiked between races. The President literally had to send the military to Alabama to ensure the Little Rock Nine (nine African-American students) could safely go to school.

Was it the 60’s and 70’s? Decades characterized by economic instability? Or the secret war in Cambodia and the lies fed to the public about the Vietnam war? When the government deceived its citizens then drafted them to die in a war they had been lied to about?

Was it the 90’s? With rampant stagflation and economic instability?

 

I am very critical of my country. I still believe it’s the best country in the world. It’s not unpatriotic to see room for improvement; it’s NOT being blind. I can still embrace the “American Ideals” while disagreeing with institutions and practices of the masses and the government.

Noam Chomsky is a controversial writer for his heavy critiques against America and his “unpatriotic” nature. In Requiem for the American Dream, he writes “There was, in the early days of the United States, an endless future of increasing wealth, freedom, achievement, and power – as long as you didn’t pay too much attention to the victims”  (6). Chomsky then talks about the deaths of the Native Americans and the exploitation of slaves. People can see this as an attack on America and react with typical outbursts of anger.

But what he says is true. America was built on the bones of the less fortunate: natives, slaves, indentured servants, etc. To critique America is not wrong, but a necessary part of democracy. I enjoy Chomsky’s writing because it recognizes this. To embrace the American ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality, we must first check that the institutions which ensure those rights are truly looking out for OUR best interests.