In the sixth grade choir I had to learn a song which sang the lines adorning the Statue of Liberty. I have held them in my heart since, unable to forget them as they were so thoroughly drilled into me. I feel every American should learn these words and repeat them before every day’s start, specifically the emboldened writing at the end, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, that horribly nationalistic garbage.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Now that is America, that is the promise, that is the dream.
In the creation of this nation, we began to forge a new road in the method of governance, new standards on the definition of a nation and how its citizenry imagined itself. Instead of connecting to a long past, a legacy of ancestry and history going back into the mists of time, America instead came to be a nation looking forward to the future. Coming from the European ethic, I find it small wonder that so many immigrants fall so deeply in love with America in a way the native (I know, I know) born cannot understand. When you come from a place steeped deeply in ancient history, it inevitably holds a population back, as it leads to infighting and internal divisions, and holds that the best days are behind, and only perpetuation of diminishing returns remains.
Think of the famous nature scene of two impalas fighting while a lion sprints towards them. So focused on the “threat” of the other impala and the change in internal status and hierarchy within the impalas community, they ignore entirely the true threat of annihilation charging them down. Internal conflict is a luxury only afforded to those who have completely eliminated all threats, for it otherwise leaves clear room for defeat. Our focus cannot waver from the lions that hunt us.
Yet I watch now as this forward looking aspect of American life turns to the glories of the past, and I shudder, for the allure of the past represents the lions that hound at the gates, and we seem about to let them in. History abounds with temptations of glories and better practices. We are creatures in flux, always changing, tinkering with ourselves and our society, trying new methods of social structuring to create something that works as well as it can for the most people, or at the very least something that most people can abide to live under. Naturally, this would come to mean that sometimes some things were better in the past, and some worse. Yet the near constant tread of civilization and history is the march of the liberal order and the slow but steady establishment of the common understanding that all individuals matter, that the life of the one should be considered in relationship to the whole, and only through a mutual respect of the two can a society well flourish. History is the slow but steady elimination of slavery from our species. We all like to think that we matter, after all. Ego abounds.
The American person originated as one who knew they mattered, and knew themselves to be important creatures worthy of a better lot than their homeland offered, and so removed themselves from the old patterns and habits and came to a country that took in all parties, the home of the exiles and unwanted. The sons of serfs thusly grew up to become kings.
We now seem to return again to the days of servitude and rigid social hierarchies. We turn our backs on the famous American dream, and instead look to the glorious triumphs of the past. We fall into the trap of history. History abounds with points of glory, monuments to the abilities of men, yet with little analysis or care of the cost of the building. We marvel at the pyramids, but disregard the slaves who built them. We wonder at the great wall from space, yet forget the mongol hordes and their slaughter that “necessitated” it’s erection. The marvel of putting a man on the moon only came about because of an arms race towards nuclear Armageddon against a differing ideology that seemed to be overtaking that of liberty and the American way. The bounteous days of mid-century America that MAGA alludes to came at the cost of active segregation and oppression based on race, and the overt preservation of a system of white supremacy that we still struggle to wipe from our system. We look to the glorious output of creation, and not the pressure and pain that brought it about. America stagnates because it has no challenge now against which to rise, instead floating listless through the new century without common cause or direction. The only challenge left is that of transcendence, and that’s far too ethereal a task for the common man to imagine. Thank god for global warming.
So we instead turn upon our fellow impalas and lock our equals up in cages like dogs, all because they are 100 years too late, because they come from a different continent than before, because they seem slightly different and we are scared and weak, so we imagine that they pose the real threat. Not greed, not decay, not ecological disaster, but immigrants.
America is nothing but immigrants, and it shall forever be so lest it perish. Every nation on Earth imagines itself as a tribe, and in America alone are we a community of tribes. Which other single country so closely represents the United Nations more than we? Where else can one find a true spread of humanity? Yet once we abandon that path for insular nationalism, another shall take from us the flame of leadership and become the new light leading the way through the golden doors. The benefits are too great, the opportunities too high, and the elevation of man impossible without it. We either blend our cultures all together in peace, or we continue to stagnate in attempted domination.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that we’re better than jailing people for seeking opportunity, we just need to have faith in our national ability and future. We’re so much more than camps and cages, for nobody else holds the lamp beside the golden door. Without it, we leave the world in darkness.
Late night post-script: The insane gall of the descendants of the white invaders of the Americas who came in conquest in their ever insatiable hunger for prosperity and wealth, using indentured servitude, and slavery, and every other manner of sin in order to gain it; the descendants of the wretched poor of Ireland, Poland, Germany, Italy, France and the rest of the Old World oppressor-nations who choose to flee the state/religious/social domination and potential execution in order that they might live in blessed freedom and some room to breathe for themselves in the land conquered for just that reason, for these descendants to now turn around and slam the door in the faces of those who today seek to do the same turns my stomach and makes me feel soul-deep sick.
I must look at these things clinically and with cold-reason in order to fully understand them, and our social make-up, in order that I might kill this sickening attitude so that it cannot in mine and in all future lifetimes rise again. Such needless cruelty awakens in my gut and being the raging fire reserved for only the Gods, and calls me to great action that respectability politics has long trained me to suppress and deny. The devil wanna put me in a bowtie, as the prophet says. Yet the fires burn hot and bright, and we can feel them as they now creep up the walls. Injustice cannot stand, injustice will not stand, and one way or another injustice will burn our nation’s house to the ground. So instead let us capture this flame and hold up our torch as a beacon of bright global light. Let the light shine so brightly that every person alive on planet Earth goes to sleep excited to dream the American dream.
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
This is the land of justice, beauty, and all in humanity that is right. Let it live up to its purpose, let us live welcoming and complete in the light.