Liberty Rusting, and a New Slogan

LIBERTY RUSTING AND A NEW SLOGAN

Okay, I know what I said about changing focus. I failed. I was watching a documentary about Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, despite his human frailties, or perhaps because of them, came to understand that the role of government was not to promote the rich industrialists of America but to protect the American people from the greedy practices of those same industrialists. It reminded me of something I heard a few weeks ago, and I am paraphrasing, that Donald Trump's presidency is as consequential as FDR’s, but for the opposite reasons. Both men used the power of the executive to establish policy, but FDR did it to help the working class and to provide moral leadership, while Trump has done it to line his own pockets and dismantle as much of the past 95 years of progress on all fronts of human rights possible.

Commentators and pundits have voiced their impression that Trump wants to turn the clock back to 1950 or 1930, or perhaps 1890 at the height of the Gilded Age when robber barons made buckets of money at the expense of an unprotected workforce. I personally think he would like to push even farther back, to 1830, the era of his favorite president, Andrew Jackson. Jackson expanded cronyism with the “Spoils System,” giving jobs to personal favorites and supporters over-qualified applicants. Jackson pushed the Indian Removal Act through Congress, codifying American policy to shove all Native Americans out of the way of white Euro-American progress. Jackson owned 200 slaves.

Trump would whitewash our past, deny it existed. He does not want to learn from history, he wants to rewrite it in his own image, the same image he keeps plastering across the country. Through understanding our history, we learn from our mistakes and grow to do better. Donald Trump wants us stagnant and uneducated. An ignorant people are easier to control, to lie to, to fool, to rob. But ignorance is curable. Stupidity, which our current president exhibits in abundance, is not. This is not the America I know and love. It is not the America that says, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I was only two years old when my family sailed by those words on the way to Ellis Island. It is not the America for which Martin Luther King had a dream. It is not the country FDR envisioned when he said, “In our democracy officers of the government are the servants, and never the masters of the people.” But it could be.

We must not lose heart. We must push back against the threats facing our grand experiment. We cannot be complacent. We were always sputtering and trying and slipping, but we were always moving forward. That is the country I love, and it is up to all of us to reclaim her. So I wrote a poem, just four lines. I offer it, particularly the last line, as a new slogan for the American people. And pardon the language, please!

            Liberty Rusting

    We talk and talk and don’t do shit.

    Democrats, Republicans, I’m tired of it.

    You’re off the rails, you’re off the tracks.

    I love my country! I want her back!