Was America Ever Great?

Let’s look objectively at the “Again” part of MAGA. Was America ever great? It depends upon whom you ask.

Ask the blacks who were enslaved. Ask their descendants who were refused basic human rights for a century after being “freed.”

Ask the tribes who were slaughtered and the survivors herded like cattle onto “reservations” and left to die. They were in our ancestors’ way so they “moved” them.

Ask the US citizens of Asian descent who were imprisoned during WWII “for security.”

Ask the gay community about the bigotry they have faced every day from those who think they’re entitled to “disapprove” of them just because of some foolish religious belief.

Ask religious minorities about getting equal representation while under the thumb of a Christian majority.

When was America ever great? Unless you’re white, male, Christian and don’t care how we got to where we are, America has yet to ever be great. A nation that is not great for all of its citizens is not a great nation.

The fight to stop the whitewashing of our history is terribly important. White students must be made to understand the horrors of our past so as to not repeat them in the future. Blacks, Asians and Native Americans must be allowed to see past those same horrors and realize that America now is not the same as America back then. We all have to get beyond the hatred and resentment or America will never fully outgrow the turbulence of earlier times.

4 thoughts on “Was America Ever Great?

  1. Ernest Harben

    You are confusing the word great with the word perfect. The United States has been and is great. The country has never and is not now perfect. Great, but not perfect. And it will never be perfect. Neither will any other country.

    Like

    Reply
  2. Alan Burkhart Post author

    You are mistaken. I do not expect perfection. Humans are incapable of such. But many earlier Americans were flat out evil. And that evil remains to this day. It is that evil we must overcome. We still have more than our share of haters and racists. One does not need to be perfect to recognize the wrongness of such. So no, we’re not “great.” Nor have we ever been. We can attain that goal, but there is a lot of work to be done.

    Thanks for taking the time to comment. – AB

    Like

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.