Great Again
Donald Trump wants to make America great again. This implies, first, that America was once great but now isn’t. Second, it begs the questions of when and how America was great and what he wants it to look like when he makes it great again.
After a bit of research, I found where he described when America was great, and I’ll get to that.
- At the risk of being declared unpatriotic, I must ask when was the U.S. great?
- Was it when the Puritans escaped religious persecution only to set up their own theocracy and punish any who didn’t believe as they did?
- Or was it when they burned witches—mostly women—based on biblical passages?
- Was it at the writing of the Constitution, when slavery was approved, blacks were declared two-thirds of a person, and women and Native-Americans were deemed unfit to vote?
- Or the times when only white immigrants could be naturalized, or when Catholics or Asians could not vote?
- Was it during the time of the Fugitive Slave Law, when legally one had to return escaped slaves to their “owners?”
- Was it during the Civil War when brother killed brother in defending or opposing slavery?
- Or when the KKK ran wild lynching slaves?
- Or 100 years later when dogs were turned on blacks who still had to ask for full civil rights, and civil rights worked were killed and buried in earthen dams??
- Was it when freethinking women, 100+ years after the Constitution, were leading the charge for women’s rights, long denied them by church and state, and still not fully gained today?
- Was it during the time of The Trail of Tears, Wounded knee, Sandy Hill, and others when Native Americans were massacred in the name of manifest destiny?
- Was it during the era of carpetbaggers or robber barons?
- Or during one of the unusual moments when the U.S. wasn’t starting, fighting, or supporting a war somewhere around the world? Such moments have mostly been less than 10 years long.
- Was it during the time the U.S. had more than 35,000 gun deaths a year and more than 2 million citizens incarcerated, or the greatest income inequality, all the most in the “civilized” world (now)?
- Was it when Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, the Kennedys, King and Lennon were assassinated and Reagan shot?
- Was it when our great soil, water, timber, wildlife and other natural resources were overused, often in a way that polluted our one home?
You may say we have done many things well and have much to be thankful for, and I agree. But I also say if truth be told, we are not as great as we like to think we were or are, and while you can ignore the truth, it is still the truth.
So to what era does Trump see us returning to be great again? In an interview The New York Times published, a reporter asked the real estate mogul when do “you think the United States last had the right balance, either in terms of defense footprint or in terms of trade?”
The answer, Trump explained, was during periods of military and industrial expansion at the onset of the 20th century and again in the years after World War II. In other words, when the military/industrial complex was making millionaires and the wealth inequity was nearly as great as it is now, Or when we had recently dropped the atomic bomb and the military/industrial complex made us the greatest superpower on earth.
Now get a picture of Trump with his finger on the nuclear button.
Jim Coufal of Cazenovia is a part-time philosopher and full-time observer of global trends. He can be reached at madnews@m3pmedia.com.