"I've written and rewritten this several times. Delayed it, considered a hundred other topics, but since this is the one that won't let me rest, let me begin by saying: I am no bigot. I do not despise people for immutable characteristics or because they have a different opinion from my own. Free speech is important to me because I support your right to offend me, and my right to offend you.
As a single American woman, the 2nd Amendment is important to me, since I don't want to be pinned to the hood of a cold car in a garage at two in the morning and assaulted. To hell and be damned with your “wait on police!” I value your right to protect yourself as much as I value my right to protect myself—in any way necessary. Why should anyone stand by and allow themselves to be maimed or worse while the government politicks with constituent suffering?
It doesn't matter to me if you are brown, white, black, yellow, blue, or whatever identity you claim—I support your right to live unharassed. To go to church, temple, synagogue, or mosque freely and fearlessly. It is the way, you see, of the American spirit.
I listened to a woman in the UK recently mention how she thought America has an “incoherent” society. I laughed—no, actually, I guffawed.
1565, dear: the first permanent Spanish settlement in St. Augustine.
1585, love: the first, yet tragically unsuccessful, English colony at Roanoke.
1607, lass: the English tried again, this time at Jamestown.
1619, honey: the first Africans were brought to Point Comfort.
1620, buttercup: At Plymouth Rock, mine and so many others' ancestors from Scotland and Holland aboard the Mayflower, took their first steps in this new land.
The other half of me arrived later in the 1700s—not to mention the 1/16th of me that’s Cherokee—and if you want to talk about large groups of different tribes who were here long before 1565, sweetheart, look no further than the Native Americans!
The Spanish controlled most of southwestern America and the entire western seaboard through the mid-19th century. The French colonized Louisiana up to and throughout Canada—indeed the French owned more territory in North America than the English, and had Napoleon not sold it to Thomas Jefferson for a thruppence, nous, les Américains, parlerions peut-être français maintenant, ouais?
Then, Asian immigrants in the 19th century--German, Italian, Irish, and Polish waves in the decades after. Five centuries, boo, of unstopped migration and multiculturalism. That’s the American way.
This nation has had more people from all over creation marching through it than the Roman Empire ever did—because we have airplanes.
What united such a mismatch of colors, creeds, religions, and beliefs? To countries that don’t share America’s uniquely glorious five-century multicultural living experience (that’ll be the first line in the welcome brochure), it's hard to imagine such heterogeneity functioning with order. While order has taken hits in recent decades, I argue that the disorder comes from the collapse of the one thing that once united every American—opportunity.
For centuries, people willingly traveled to America for opportunity. The promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness kept Americans unified under an ideal, not an identity. It didn’t happen overnight. It was born through struggle—the combined struggle of all of our ancestors for five centuries!
You cannot replicate that overnight by luring desperate people with taxpayer-funded subsidies disguised as opportunity. It’s exploitative of the native population and economically crippling for immigrants to be reliant on the state to survive.
You'll never convince me to hate someone because they're different from me.
You can, however, convince me to hate you for exploiting immutable differences rather than implementing rational solutions.
💙 Chris
