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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThe America We Lost When Trump Won
NO, Im not over it.
On Election Day I felt as though I had awakened in America and gone to sleep in Ecuador, or maybe Belgium. Or Thailand, or Zambia, or any other perfectly nice country that endures the usual ups and downs of history as the years pass, headed toward no particular destiny.
Its different here, or at least it was. America was always supposed to be something, as much a vision as a physical reality, from the moment that John Winthrop, evoking Jerusalem, urged the Massachusetts Bay Colony to be as a city upon a hill. To be an American writer meant being able to share that sense of purpose, those expectations, and to flatter yourself that you were helping to shape it. Nobody expects anything out of Belgium.
More than any other country, I think, America has been a constant character in the work of its writers. Not only those writers who celebrate it ecstatically, like Walt Whitman, who made his lifes work one long ode to our young nation, or Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Toni Morrison, or E. L. Doctorow, who have picked more critically through its past. It applies as well to those who have scourged it, and exposed the worst of its contradictions and betrayals; a Richard Wright or a Ralph Ellison, or John Reed. It remained a vivid entity even in the work of those who have left it for one reason or another, Henry James or Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway, or John Dos Passos.
Their love for it, and their disappointments, all have the same roots, which are those expectations and those dreams. Even at our lowest, we believe with Langston Hughess wish to let America be America again/The land that never yet has been, and yet must be; with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s overworked but ever more necessary claim that the moral arc of the universe may be long but that here, at least, it bends toward justice. Even its sternest critics agreed: America was going places!
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/21/opinion/sunday/the-america-we-lost-when-trump-won.html?emc=edit_th_20170122&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=57435284
BumRushDaShow
(129,440 posts)and a good analogy that the author provided.
Squinch
(51,004 posts)The next line in the quote is something to the effect that, "If we fail, we will become a byword, we will open the mouths of our enemies to speak ill of our ways."
It's not self-congratulation as we often use it. It is a warning.
What Winthrop was saying was, "Everyone is watching us, so we must succeed. To do that every one of us needs to always be on our guard to behave according to the highest possible ethics. If we fail, the name of our community will always be the byword, the shorthand term, that our enemies use to say that our values are not workable."
We ARE a city on a hill and everyone IS watching, and Mr. American Carnage is about to make us a byword that is shorthand for, "See? Democracy doesn't really work."
That is why we have to fight him.