My people are Americans

[Zorro]

I, Leonard Pitts, venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

I’ve got something to say about “you people.”

That, as you may recall, was how I referred, in a recent column, to Mike Pence and others who have apparently sworn an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Florida taco bowl connoisseur who used to be president. It left a handful of readers well and truly irked. As one of them put it: “‘You people?’ How dare you lump all Trump voters like that.”

Well, dear reader, I cannot tell a lie. That objectifying language was no accident. Rather, it was designed to make a point. In order to understand that point, you have to understand something else:

I’m an American. By that, I don’t simply mean that I’m a U.S. citizen, though I am. But what I really mean is that I venerate the ideals on which this country was founded.

Unalienable rights. Life and liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Freedom of speech. Of faith. Of conscience. Government by consent of the governed. Equality before the law. Because of those ideals, America already was a revolution even before it won independence from England. Despite themselves, a band of slaveholding white men somehow founded a nation based on an aspirational, transformational declaration of fundamental human rights.

And then came the taco bowl connoisseur and his acolytes. Their values — more accurately, their lack of values — have coarsened the country, impoverished its spirit, debased what once was revered. Like something out of “It Can’t Happen Here,” Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel of a fascist takeover, our foundational ideals suddenly seem flimsy and insubstantial, thin tissues of fidelity in a hurricane of contempt.

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2021/10/20/my-people-are-americans-column/

[MN2theMax]

1. The last paragraph really sums it up well

"You people don’t believe in freedom of speech. My people do.

You people don’t cherish the rule of law. My people do.

You people don’t support democratic ideals. My people do.

You people don’t value facts and reason. My people do.

You people don’t honor the aspirational and transformational ideas that made this country great. My people do.

For those reasons and more, you people are not my people.

My people are Americans."

[OldBaldy1701E]

2. Well said

But the rot was around before that orange gibbon came onto the scene. We need to stop attaching all the machinations of the rethugs to that sleezeball. When a car needs service for a blown tire, a bad gasket, a fried alternator, and a rip in the seat, one doesn't just patch the rip because it happened to be the most recent damage and then say 'the car is fixed'. None of the ideals mentioned in the last part of the article suddenly became 'librul crap' when the cheeto took office. The reight wing has always hated every single aspect of them.

[Hortensis]

3. Well, I wish they weren't Americans too. We've always had to drag

angry reactionaries along with us, kicking and screaming, clawing backwards, forever newly outraged as we advance.