We must stand together
After reading the recent column from John Lucas, I felt I had to respond.
Although the title of the piece was “Nation’s College Full of UnAmerican Professors,” the body of his ramblings seemed to deal with America’s failures and the “we don’t win anymore” policy put forward by DJ Trump. Mr. Lucas belabors these points and nauseum while still calling the U.S. the ‘baddest rooster in the henhouse.’
It’s hard to reconcile these two ideas. Perhaps we should just throw his points out and look at the salient issues. John Lucas and DJ Trump say we don’t win. Yes, Mr. Lucas and Mr. Trump, we do win. America wins, period. America is the country that all other countries want to be. People from around the world would give anything to come and be a citizen of the USA. If we didn’t win, I doubt this would be the case. And the reason is because of our ideals.
We are the melting pot. Americans have rights, among these life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We are created equal by our creator. We are all children of our Constitution. Immigrants have come to our shores and fought side by side with native-born citizens to uphold our Constitution and our country and our ideals.
We win because we work together. When America is facing obstacles and hardships, we put aside our differences and concentrate on what we have in common which is our country. When we haven’t won, it has been because we have been divided as a nation and as a people, mostly by politics and politicians.
When seeds of discord have been sown, we have not won. Look at one of the wars we lost. Remember Vietnam. We were a country divided then. We did not pull together. Our battles among ourselves did us in. We don’t win when we are divided. When we deride other Americans for how they live, or think, for the clothes they wear, for their skin color or for the God they worship, we don’t win. Our founding fathers knew this and they told us so. “A house divided cannot stand,” Ben Franklin told the writers of the Constitution. “if we don’t hang together on this, we will each hang separately.”
Only America can defeat itself. When we listen to the rhetoric of division and hatred, we are doomed to lose. When we stand together, we are strong. A comic strip character named Pogo said it best, “We have met the enemy and it is us.” When Americans work together, there is nothing we can’t do. When we listen to those who seek to divide us and set us against ourselves, we lose. America and Americans are always stronger when we stand together.
Heather Ciavotto is a resident of Dawson