Where did America's Big Heart go?

Last edited Sat Feb 16, 2019, 11:50 AM - Edit history (1)

The Story that i was taught in the late 60s and the 70s was that America had done some bad things in The Past, but we had great people like Martin Luther King who taught us that the arc of the moral universe was long but it bent toward justice.

The Story that America was full of Big Hearts, which included making a place for Everyone, was taught on Mayberry RFD, Little House on the Prairie, Mary Tyler Moore, and just about every other show of that era. The Blacks were showing up as big name singers and the Gays were winning the right to be alive and vulnerable people were regularly shown as victims to be rescued by well meaning strong white men which was their job. The job of women like Mary Tyler Moore was to nudge white men toward epiphanies with humor and a smile. It seemed like a happier universe was on its way.

My textbooks showed pictures of a moon-landing, and sacks of grain being provided by America to starving kids in Africa which made us little-schoolchildren-hearts swell with pride. Little Jessica fell down a well and everyone in the country clapped when she was rescued. Nixon started talking to China and we edged back from the brink of nuclear war in the 70s, and all that remained was for the whole world to be educated and brought up to follow in the footsteps of the U.S.’s constantly improving example of freedom and democracy.

By 12th grade in 1980 I was confused why the country seemed to be preferring Reagan over the nice man Jimmy Carter, and i tried to get my history teacher to educate me about why the U.S. kept picking the wrong side in Latin America instead of supporting the poor the way the Maryknoll sisters were doing. So maybe that was the beginning of the End of the Innocence.

Something got very HARD in America since then. After the surreal immorality of Iran Contra, and seeds of an official policy of meanness, directed at the Poor, started sprouting, there was some kind of party and burgeoning technology during the 90s, before 9-11 and the Bush Torture Years were upon us. Where did the Innocence go? American Torture was an abomination. After Little Bush, a long, beautiful respite, but the right kept telling lies and feeding the ugly monsters until they could take over again.

People showing up on America shores asking for help are sent to prison instead, for having the audacity to expect that America would consider their “application for asylum”. Officially, the American Big Heart is dead. There are a thousand examples: Every grubbing dime should go to the Owners, or to private prisons, not to public achools or hungry kids or poor sick people. Their dream is not of a caliber of landing on the moon, saving Europe from genocide, or bending the arc of the moral universe faster, but rather, they dream of having a Wall built for them with barbed wire on top to keep desperate people fleeing violence or starvation OUT. They no longer dream of “level playing fields”, but of the lottery: they dream not of education and opportunity for all, but of preserving privilege, like the privilege of super-billionaires to pass on wealth (and ill-gotten gains) untaxed to their entitled progeny.

Trump supporters revel in cruelty and inhumanity. Here’s my criteria: if you don’t have a Big Heart, we don’t want you here. Maybe we can pay Mexico to take the cruel and small-minded fearful people who still stand at Trump rallies off our hands? Can it absorb the Koch Brothers, Peter Thiel, Sean Hannity and Ann Coulter? We could find a compromise: conservatives, we will help you build a wall, but we liberals get to decide which UnAmerican people get deported.

We choose to deport border vigilantes, and cops who shoot at unarmed twelve year olds, and any politicians voting against healthcare without proposing viable alternatives. Engaged in voter suppression? GONE. Let’s deport people who make their fortunes by 1) bribing doctors into prescribing opioids, 2) lobbying against sensible gun regulations, or 3) betraying American democracy in service to brutal dictators. Definitely deport the fake billionaire tax dodgers who don’t pay their hired help and kick their sick infant nephews off the insurance plan.

Mexico, I know you don’t want them. But if we drop them off penniless at a bus station in a violent neighborhood, like has been done to other deportees (to their detriment and demise) in the last couple years? Well, maybe they’ll learn something about survival of the fittest. You could make a plan to contain them like the disease that they are. You could put them in a private prison, while you figure out what you’re gonna do to keep your country safe from these monsters. We could hand over their bank accounts to you for safekeeping. If you have to deduct $15 a minute for any phone calls they make, so be it, but please, block them from calling “U.S.” — we’ve had enough of their poison, and need time to detoxify.